Need for a Core Cadastral System – Develop once and make available for all
Daniel Roberge, chair FIG Commission 7 (2011-2014)
Senior Land Administration Specialist, World Bank, Romania
Abstract
Despite the fact that property right is a human right recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (UNO, 1948) and based on some estimations circulating among the surveying community, only one
quarter of the world population has such right officially registered and this for many reasons: costs, lack of
knowledge, accessibility, corruption, customary rights, etc. In the recent years, FIG and international
organization have raised the awareness on this important issue in order to propose solution to fasten the
land registration process worldwide. But these initiatives have more focused on the input side. But few of
them are proposing simplifying solution for the national cadastre and land registration organizations.
Yet, establishing and managing such national organization is complicated. It requires an important level of
financial, material, human and IT resources which are not available in most of the countries where it is
needed. These organizations have to develop the processes, the IT systems to receive, check, register,
maintain, secure and disseminate official cadastre and land registration data and to hired and train the staff
to manage it. But in fact, all these national cadastre and land registration organization are developing quite
similar infrastructure to manage the land properties. So why not try to develop this infrastructure once and
make it available for all? This is more feasible than ever with the adoption of the Land Administration
Domain Model (which include the Social Tenure Domain Model) as an ISO standard (ISO 19152). This is
what this paper will propose.
Background
The right to own a parcel of land, a house, an apartment, a place where to live and raise a family is
fundamental for all humans and this is recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the
article 17:
“Article 17.
(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.”
Possession is also acknowledged by the European Convention on Human Rights, conditional to public
interest and the right of the State to regulate the use and collect taxes:
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Protocol to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms
ARTICLE 1
Protection of property
“Every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions. No one shall
be deprived of his possessions except in the public interest and subject to the conditions provided
for by law and by the general principles of international law.
The preceding provisions shall not, however, in any way impair the right of a State to enforce such
laws as it deems necessary to control the use of property in accordance with the general interest or
to secure the payment of taxes or other contributions or penalties.”
Moreover, since the implementation of the first modern cadastres in the 19th century, namely in France by
Napoleon Bonaparte in 1807, this powerful tool has been largely implemented in most of the developed
countries and under development in many emerging states. Cadastral systems, namely since the UN Bogor
Declaration in 1996 (Bogor, 1996), are considered as an important infrastructure of sustainable
development worldwide, and are supported by many international organizations. Only on the economic
side, land and property markets, including construction, may represent as much as 15% of the GDP in a
developed country, and nearly two thirds of a nation’s wealth is derived from property assets (Adlington,
2014).
The International Federation of Surveyors (FIG), the World Bank and the United Nations, namely through
the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and UN Habitat, are among the lead supporters of such
infrastructure.
The World Bank is active worldwide, funding and supporting the land and property sector on every
continent. More specifically, in the last twenty years, the Bank has been very active in Europe and Central
Asia region, especially in the former soviet countries, supporting more than 40 projects in 25 countries.
Moreover, the World Bank highlights the importance of land registration systems in the economic
development by publishing an annual ranking of countries providing efficient land registration services in
Doing Business.
Over the years, FIG has promoted the importance of Cadastre and Land Registration, namely through FIG
Commission 7 work and many publications, namely the renowned publication Cadastre 2014, published in
1998 and translated in more than 20 languages.
The Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the
Context of National Food Security (FAO, 2012), developed under the leadership of the United Nation Food
and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and adopted by the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) in 2012,
highlight the responsibility of the States to put in place systems to:

“record individual and collective tenure rights in order to improve security of tenure rights, including
those held by the State and public sector, private sector, and indigenous peoples and other communities
with customary tenure systems”;
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“ensure that everyone is able to record their tenure rights and obtain information without discrimination
on any basis”;
“ensure that information on tenure rights is easily available to all, subject to privacy restrictions”.
Over the last years, UN Habitat has been a major promoter of pro-poor land tools through the Global Land
Tool Network (GLTN.net) and namely supporting the development of the Social Tenure Domain Model
(STDM). The STDM has been developed while the design of the Land Administration Domain Model
(LADM) to improve the security of tenure for vulnerable groups in developing countries.
Unfortunately, despite this strong and worldwide recognition on the importance of land rights security, it is
estimated that only one quarter of the world population has their land rights officially registered and this
for many reasons: costs, lack of knowledge, accessibility, corruption, customary rights, etc.
Therefore, without officially registered land titles, many people are threaten to be deprived from their
possession, evicted from their land parcel and this happens too often. And the absence of good land
registration has many other negative socio-economic impacts: land conflicts, bad land governance, loss in
taxation for governments, underdeveloped agriculture and land market, no access to mortgage, etc.
In the recent years, some structuring initiatives have been undertaken aiming to improve, facilitate
and accelerate land registration worldwide.
A major step forward: the LADM
The most important achievement in the recent years in the area of global land registration is the development
of the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) which serves two goals (Uitermark & al. 2010):
1. Provide a basis for the development of Land Administration systems (LA systems);
2. Enable involved parties, both within one country and between different countries, to communicate,
based on the shared vocabulary.
LADM defines a reference model, covering basic information-related components of LA. Basic
components relate to the following:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Parties (people and organizations);
Rights, responsibilities, and restrictions (RRR’s);
Spatial units (parcels, buildings and networks);
Spatial sources (surveying);
Spatial representations (geometry and topology).
LADM provides a terminology for LA, based on various national and international systems. The
terminology allows a shared description of different formal or informal practices and procedures in various
jurisdictions.
In brief, LADM provides the common ground that will facilitate the development of land administration
systems. This is a major step forward.
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The LADM became officially a new ISO standard (ISO 19152) in 2012 after a four years standards
development process within ISO/TC211 and six years of preparation within the FIG, while the original idea
for such a standard was launched at the 2002 FIG congress in Washington D.C.
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Fit-For-Purpose Land Administration
Another relevant initiative is the Fit-For-Purpose Land Administration (FIG, 2014) which is the result of
cooperation between the World Bank and FIG over recent years to address the issue of building and
sustaining land administration systems proposing to put in place flexible, inclusive, participatory,
affordable, reliable, attainable and upgradable land tenure projects. Essentially, the Fit-For-Purpose
approach includes four key principles:
– General boundaries rather than fixed boundaries. Using general boundaries to delineate land areas
will be sufficient for most land administration purposes especially in rural and semi-urban areas. In the
present context, the term “general boundary” means one whose position has not been precisely
determined, although usually, the delineation will relate to physical features in the field.
– Aerial imageries rather than field surveys. The use of high resolution satellite/aerial imagery is
sufficient for most land administration purposes. This approach is three to five times cheaper than field
surveys.
– Accuracy relates to the purpose rather than technical standards. Accuracy of the land information
should be understood as a relative issue related to the use of this information.
– Opportunities for updating, upgrading and improvement. Building the spatial framework should
be seen in a perspective of opportunities for on-going updating, sporadic upgrading, and incremental
improvement whenever relevant or necessary for fulfilling land policy aims and objectives.
This FFP approach should contribute to raise the number of properties registered worldwide. In the coming
months, FFP Guidelines will be developed and will propose the technical, legal and institutional
frameworks required to support the approach.
MapMyRight initiative
The MapMyRights (MMR) initiative aims to provide a free to use, transparent, global platform where
citizens, as well as stakeholders who are interested in driving forward property rights, e.g. government and
the private sector, can record evidence of their land rights. The proposed solution is based on global cloud
based platforms, open source collaborative platform to support Apps, predominantly ISO land information
standards, mobile technology and participatory /crowdsourcing techniques to capture and maintain land
rights (McLaren, 2014).
Based on what is described by its founder, MMR initiative is aiming to:
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
Support of Fit-For-Purpose Approach
Provide a Global Infrastructure Platform to Manage Evidence of Land Rights - A global platform that
is secure, free, open and transparent to all will be facilitated by partners. The strategy for the technology
of MMR is to create an 'architecture of participation', building on leading geospatial infrastructure and
extending existing collaboration communities. This will leverage an existing core geospatial platform
to provide the base web mapping infrastructure and a collaboration platform will be built on top; all in
open source software.
Access to Global and Local datasets for Contextual Information – with free access to global and local
datasets, especially high resolution satellite imagery, open street maps, topographic mapping and
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
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existing land information, to provide the context for recording land rights will be negotiated with
suppliers.
Build Capacity to Capture Evidence of Land Rights - Trusted intermediaries will be trained to capture
evidence of land rights through engagement with Land Professionals and sharing resources with other
information services, e.g. health, financial and agriculture services. This will ensure that capacity
evolves and scales across communities and professions.
Formalize Crowdsourced Land Rights - It is the ambition of MMR to migrate these crowdsourced land
rights to formal land rights accepted by governments. MMR will engage with National Land
Registration and Cadastral Agencies wherever possible to define new processes to formalize
crowdsourced land rights.
Build a World Class Research and Practitioner Global Network - A key element of the ecosystem will
be the creation of a world class research and practitioner global network to support knowledge sharing.
This initiative is a very valuable one aiming to provide to all, the common tools needed to facilitate land
registration. This initiative is a crowdsource approach in which a citizen can register his/her “right” or
“possession” into the MMR system. MMR is based on an 'architecture of participation', inspired by
Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap which have both created successful architectures, where the tools are
enhanced to support the community, and the community grows as the tools get better. Everyone collaborates
on the same data for different purposes, driven by different incentives, but the core is a commons that all
naturally contribute to. This is an interesting concept. MMR allows the citizen to register his/her
“possession” or “right” into MMR system. As mentioned previously, MMR has the ambition to migrate
these crowdsourced land rights to formal land rights accepted by governments. Meanwhile, the only thing
that the citizen will have is a “wikiright” registered in a non-official system. And the roadmap to migrate
these crowdsourced land rights to formal ones could be long and will not necessarily lead to such formal
right.
Currently, based on what is displayed on the MMR website (www.mapmyrights.org), it seems that this
initiative is stalled because of business difficulties and thus, “the initiative will now morph into a primary
knowledge source of crowdsourced / citizen centric approaches to land rights worldwide.”
The FAO SOLA Open Source Software
FAO invested important effort to develop a generic open source cadastre and registration software called
the “Solutions for Open Land Administration” (SOLA). The objective of the SOLA software (Pullar, 2013),
which was funded by the Government of Finland, is to make computerized cadastre and registration systems
based on open source software more affordable and sustainable in developing countries. It also enables
quick improvements in transparency and equity of land administration governance and improves land
administration services to the citizens.
SOLA was designed to support integrated registration and cadastre functions in a typical district land office.
It is based on international good practice for service delivery, good land governance and data management.
Its design also facilitates customization at the local level. It is based on the following generic land
administration procedure:
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The SOLA database design is based on LADM (ISO 19152). The SOLA software includes eight
interoperable webservices.
During the development of SOLA, each pilot implementation was undertaken by a team of local software
developers who, under the guidance of an FAO SOLA Mentor, customized the generic SOLA software
(developed by FAO) to reflect local land legislation and administrative practices.
SOLA as being implemented nationally to support land registration in Lesotho, Samoa and Tonga. FAO is
currently planning state level implementations of a customized version of SOLA Registry in a couple of
Nigerian states.
Complementary modules have been proposed to support State land management, property valuation, quality
control of cadastral plans and a mobile application to support community recording of land rights. However,
additional funding is being sought to support their development.
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Facilitating Land Registration Initiatives
As we can see, there are many important stakeholders wishing to facilitate and accelerate the pace of land
registration worldwide. And this is important. Otherwise, at the current pace, it will take hundreds of years
to have completed the global land registration.
The FFP approach works on the surveying side trying to convince the surveying community to use all
possible solution, even if it is not as accurate as they learned at school. And the next objective to provide
them some guidelines is very relevant and will certainly help the surveying community to endorse the
approach and use it. However, this approach does not provide any solution to facilitate the establishment
of a national cadastre and land registration organization, nor the management and dissemination of the
cadastral data. The FFP approach helps in getting more parcels registered but does not provide any solution
to facilitate their management by a national organization.
Establishing and managing a national organization of cadastre and land registration is complicated. It
requires an important level of financial, material, human and IT resources which are not available in most
of the countries where it is needed. These organizations have to develop the work processes, the IT systems
to receive, check, register, secure and disseminate official cadastre and land registration data, to hire and
train qualified staff. But in fact, all these national cadastre and land registration organization are developing
the same infrastructure to manage the same kind of objects: land properties. So why not try to develop this
infrastructure once and make it available for all? This is more feasible than ever with the adoption of the
Land Administration Domain Model as an ISO standard (ISO 19152).
This is partially what the MMR initiative intended to put in place. However, this approach has important
limitation that would make it difficult to sustain. First, the owner of the system is a private company, making
impossible to give “authority” to the data registered in the system. Trust will be hard to build. Moreover,
with such private model there are some business risks and this is confirmed by the recent news displayed
on the MMR website.
Second, the concept of “wikirights” will be difficult to sell to citizens and there is a high risk that the
citizens’ needs (securing their rights) will never be fulfilled with this initiative, even if the ultimate objective
of the promoters is to “migrate these crowdsourced land rights to formal land rights accepted by
governments”. There is no guarantee that this will happen. Thus the citizens will be disappointed and the
system will lose its credibility and its usefulness.
In brief, like FFP is proposing, it is important to support the surveying community worldwide to work faster
and cheaper using all accessible tools and techniques in order to fulfil the needs of the citizens: having their
property/possession secured in an official register. However, this will not be achieved without providing
also a toolbox to the national agency which will sustainably officialize, manage and keep and disseminate
the land information.
The SOLA software developed by FAO seems to be the most advanced solution to support national cadastre
and land registration organizations. It provides supporting tools to manage generic land registration
procedures.
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A core cadastral system managed by an existing recognized international
organization
Each and every national cadastre and land registration organization in the world needs a system to:
1. Manage the land parcel (the object)
 Validation of the geometry
 Check of overlaps, gaps, topology, etc
 Create, subdivide, merge, correct parcels
2. Register the rights and restrictions affecting the said parcel
3. Provide national geospatial datasets needed to facilitate and support the land registration processes
4. Manage the security/access (who can register, modify, etc.)
5. Ensure the conservation and integrity of the data
6. Ensure the payment of cadastral and registration services
7. Ensure the consultation and dissemination of data contained in the land register
In a simplistic way, this is what every national cadastre and land registration organization is developping
and this is what should be developed once, based on the ISO standard.
With the development of the SOLA software, FAO has developed and made available and customizable
some generic modules to facilitate some of the above mentionned activities. However, issues around human
and financial resources to ensure the sustainability at the local level remain.
To overcome this important problem and make the management of a land registration organization easier,
maybe we could think about developing and externalizing a core cadastral system (CCS) under the
custodianship and stewardship of an existing recognized international organization? Outsourcing such
responsibility to an NGO or a private company would not be sustainable and the ”authority” and trust,
difficult, if not impossible to build. Situations like the one encountered by MMR should not happen with
the CCS.
Moreover, unlike MMR, the client of this CCS would not be the citizens, nor private surveyors or notaries
but only National Cadastre and Land Registration agencies, keeping their role and responsibilities provided
by their national legislation. The existing international organization (IO) that would become responsible for
the CCS would provide to the national cadastre and land registration organizations the infrastructure to
define, geo-reference, register, secure and make available the official cadastral and property data covering
their territory. Each national organization would have access to their own data sets, including geospatial
data to facilitate geo-referencing and data search and consultation.
In the CCS, the security rules to add, modify, erase or update data would have to be similar to those used
in the banking system. Only the owner of the account (the national cadastre and land registration
organization) would be allowed to register rights or possessions and make any modification to the data and
only after having passed through the security checks and using public-key infrastructure. The security
would be crucial. An inspiring model of this approach could be the Register of the Domain of the State
existing in the province of Quebec, in which, the clients of the Register are ministries and other public
organizations, keeping their own responsibilities in terms of right’s registration but using a common official
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infrastructure to register rights, restrictions of responsibilities and using governmental public key
infrastructure. Each organization having access to their own datasets.
The CCS could be self-financed. The business model will have to be developed but the users’ fees could
be based on the GDP per capita of the country and access to services could be charged.
Obviously, the national cadastre and land registration organizations using the CCS services would have to
adapt their legal and administrative frameworks to the LADM and the CCS data specifications.
With a liable IO managing the core cadastre and land registration processes, the national organizations
would save a lot of money (at the scale of the planet this would represent billions of dollars) and would rely
on a safe, up-to-date, reliable and sustainable infrastructure and then could concentrate their resources and
efforts on land reforms in partnership with land surveyors, using the most suitable techniques and FFP
approach to speed the land right data collection.
Next steps
This proposal is made with the only objective to launch the discussion among the main stakeholders
involved in land tenure security: UN FAO, UN Habitat, the World Bank and FIG. If we want to succeed in
the global land registration arena, the initiatives and resources have to be coordinated.
If the idea proposed in this paper makes sense, and find support among the stakeholders, a feasibilty study
could be quickly developed to propose a business model and costs/benefit analisis.
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References
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Domain Model published by ISO. FIG Working Week 2013
Pullar, N. (2013). The FAO SOLA Open Source Software Pilots – A Step Towards Transparent and
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Administration (SOLA) software – Customizing Open Source Software to Support Land
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