Architecture for instrument-centred land administration applications

Abstract

An ongoing challenge in the world today is the effective, authentic and sustainable administration of national land resources including interests in land and the use of land. Many nations are facing challenges in the development of digital land information systems (LIS) to support the availability of information and efficient processing of land transactions. The vast range of often conflicting, contextually varying and evolving social, cognitive and physical concepts and practices associated with relationships between land, people and governments, presents many challenges to the implementation of a universal land information system (LIS) that are not well-addressed by conventional technologies and approaches. This thesis responds to the goal of an affordable LIS implementation that can be easily deployed and maintained in developing nations to support sustainable land administration (LA) through the definition of an alternative instrument-centred theory and approach to LIS implementation. The concept of prescriptive instruments is introduced to relate formal policy instruments including laws with less-formal conceptualisations of land, and this is developed as the driver of evolution for LIS in specific domains. The transaction instruments defined by prescription within a domain are related formally and directly to the implementation of processes and the incremental development and deployment of systems. The theory defines an append-only temporal model of information and an emergent paradigm for LIS that mirrors the essential properties of prescriptive definition and transaction instruments. The variability in concepts and practices that occurs across space is related to the variability that occurs over time into a single conceptual treatment that allows for the coexistence of heterogeneous concepts and practices, and for their evolution. In addition, the technical and social components of LA are combined into a single model that relates a social media dimension to formal record keeping. A range of formal and informal concepts of LA, and temporal queries that account for evolution, are modelled in order to test the suitability and efficacy of the instrument-centred theory. Finally, a number of options for future research are provided.