Chapter 5: Towards a National Land Information Infrastructure for Managing Layered Property Markets in Federated Countries

The dominant focus of how we live and operate in society has changed over the last decade, to the economic reality of scarce natural resources and a shared vision for sustainable development. New markets are emerging as a way to manage scarce resources as new land interests are recognised. Land administration provides the infrastructure for secure land market transactions, and government macroeconomic policies work to manage the economy as a whole. As new land markets develop, there is an increasing need for better, more reliable information for improved economic management of land and its resources. This need is most evident in many federated market economies where land administration is undertaken by state, provincial, or local governments; while, macroeconomic policies to manage land markets occur at central level. In these countries, the capacity of independent, state-based land administration agencies to meet increasingly national drivers, particularly national economic policy, is challenging. This stems from an information asymmetry often caused by inadequate information flows between state and central governments. State-based laws and processes make it difficult for central policy departments to access integrated land information, to manage markets that are increasingly national in focus. Past, traditional approaches to improve land information access include: standard ontologies and conceptual schemas such as the Federated Dat