PhD Defence Mr Christiaan Lemmen

Dept. of Urban and Regional Planning and Geo-information Management

Title of defence

A Domain Model for Land Administration

75% or the “people to land relationships” worldwide are not documented. This concerns about 4.5 billion cases. With a growing population this situation results in land disputes, land grabbing and neglecting of rights of local people.

Land Administration provides documentation on people to land relationships. Land Administration is an instrument for implementation of Land Policies - part of governmental policy on environmental sustainability, economic development, disaster management, social justice and equity and political stability. Land Administration is in support to legal security (protection of land rights), access to credit (collateral for mortgage or micro credit), spatial planning, land tax and resource management (mining, forestry, and nature). Many countries have an incomplete, not up to date and therefore non-reliable land administration.

Standards are needed in Land Administration, both for initial data acquisition and for data maintenance. Experience learns that it is not an easy task to design and set up a land administration. In many countries modelling expertise to set up Land Administration Systems is lacking. It should be noted that those systems contain high volumes of data.
In this thesis a common standard for the land administration domain is designed and proposed for implementation. Such a standard is in support to development of software applications and this will accelerate the development and implementation of proper land administration in support to sustainable development.

The International Standard is expected to be published as ISO standard in August 2012, a breakthrough in the development of this type of systems. There is already recognition and support by FAO, UN HABITAT and several countries.

Biography

Christiaan is Director of the OICRF; the International Office of Cadastre and Land Records. He is Senior Geodetic Advisor at Kadaster International; his experience is built up in more then 25 countries worldwide. Experience concerns institutional development in cadastre and land-management, strategic and organisational developments in cadastre, land registry and land consolidation in relation to ICT aspects; data acquisition strategies for land administration; and in evaluation and monitoring of developments and implementations of ICT.

As an Assistant Professor he is strongly involved in the activities of the School for Land Administration Studies at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) at the University of Twente. The School of Land Administration Studies operates under the umbrella of the United Nations University.

Christiaan is Chair of the Working Group on Pro Poor Land Tools of Commission 7, Cadastre and Land Management of the International Federation of Surveyors.
He is editor of the International Standard for the Land Administration Domain and is responsible for the development of the contents of this ISO standard.

He is contributing editor of GIM International, the Global Magazine for Geomatics
Christiaan is author of about 120 publications, including 9 scientific publications.
He has been guest editor of five special issues on Cadastral Systems of the International Journal on Computers, Environment and Urban Systems.

Lemmen, C.H.J., van Oosterom, P.J.M. (Promotor) and van der Molen, P. (Promotor) (2012) A domain model for land administration. PhD Thesis Technical University Delft ; summaries in English and Dutch. ITC Dissertation 210, ISBN: 978-90-77029-31-2.

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