Since the start of the 21st century, great progress has been made with rural land certification in Ethiopia. This process, however, has been mainly confined to the so called first phase certificates. These certificates do identify the land holding households (with name etc. and photographs), but limit the geo-referencing to indicating the size (acreage, often only estimated) and listing the names of neighboring households. As a rule the data is also only kept as paper records at one or more levels of local government. To be able to profit from all the benefits land administration can bring, it will also be necessary to collect graphical and/or geometrical data on the spatial units to which the land holders have their (eternal) use rights. After the adding of such spatial plans, some speak of second phase certificates, although very few of these have been actually issued till date. In a number of places, with support from different donors (SIDA, USAID), the regional land administration authorities have piloted with using GPS and GIS to collect and process boundary surveys. In July 2008 a team (partly overlapping with the authors), did a first simple field test with the use of high resolution imagery as base for data collection – this second phase certificate can be combined with a first phase certificate in practice. This limited data set was processed at the ITC in the Netherlands with ArcGIS software, and has been re-processed later - for test purposes - with the first prototype of the Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM). The STDM prototype will be available as a Free/Libre/Open Source Sofware and the intension is to use this software for an extensive field test in Ethiopia in 2009. This implies a digital version of the geometric data will be available – which can be related to alpha numerical data. This paper describes the experiences during the above mentioned field test and gives some recommendations for ways forward.