Specialization of the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM): An Option for Expanding the Legal Profiles

The Land Administration Domain Model, LADM, passed on the 1st of November 2012 unanimously the final vote towards becoming an international standard, ISO 19152. Based on the standard this paper is a proposal for a more detailed classification of interests in land as modelled within LADM and an attempt to raise the awareness of the possibilities to further develop the LADM?s “right”, “restriction” and “responsibility” (RRR) classes. The current standardised classification of RRRs in the LADM is restricted to a top-level classification of RRRs. In this paper the authors use the classification of interests in land described in the newly developed Legal Cadastral Domain Model, LCDM, to further develop the LADM. The LDM is based on comparative international legal investigations, including case studies from Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland and Sweden. The conceptual basis of the LCDM is that interests in land can be classified according to whether they are limiting or beneficial to real property ownership. The classification in the model is further based on the paradigm that there are two major types of interest in land; privately agreed interests and public regulations imposed by a public agency to further the interests of society. This is a pattern that can be observed in the legislation of many different jurisdictions, and therefore a useful extension of the international standard. The result of the paper is a proposal on how the administrative part of the LADM (i.e. interests in land) can be expanded. This work can be used to improve and extend the current informative LADM Annexes F „Legal Profiles? and J „Code lists?. Customary and informal rights have not been investigated in the LCDM, but can already be represented in the LADM (and its extension STDM: Social Tenure Domain Model). Inclusion of further options for representation of detailed attributes might be very useful for a next LADM version. The possible extension of LADM does not bring any limitation to the use and implementation of LADM – which is already on-going in several countries. On the contrary: the flexibility of LADM as a concept is demonstrated again and the proposed extensions may be very useful for those countries where a more detailed classification of RRR is under discussion