Code list management supported through a controlled domain vocabulary

Abstract

Standards like the ISO 19152:2012 Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) basically specifies classes and the relations among them. However, this methodology cannot catch the richness of variations of the domain, and therefore code lists are introduced as a supplement. In fact, the LADM mentions a number of code lists for each of the packages of the standard. The codes with name and description are not part of the standard; rather, examples are provided in an informative Annex J of the standard, while the specification of the code lists is left to ‘User communities [who] have to define and manage their own values when implementing this International [LADM] Standard’. As the mentioned user communities all belong to the domain of Land Administration, the specification of code lists would benefit from applying a shared or harmonized terminology. The alternative would lead to communication problems and costs. Within other domains, e.g. agriculture, economy, and environment, controlled vocabularies have been developed (AGROVOC; STW–Thesaurus for Economics; GEMET), each amounting to several thousand terms. The Cadastre and Land Administration Thesaurus (CaLAThe) was issued 2011, based on the then draft version of LADM. The present CaLAThe version 3 of 2019 was extended to about 200 terms, reflecting also the terms of the OGC Land and Infrastructure Conceptual Model Standard (LandInfra) of 2016. The paper explores the potential of applying CaLAThe for code list management, motivated among others by the decision by ISO/TC 211 to revise LADM in terms of a Stage 0-project. Semantic web tools are investigated in order to provide for more explicit semantics of code list values (cf. van Oosterom et al., 2019), in line with previous proposals (Paasch et al., 2015) and (Stubkjær et al., 2018). Moreover, suggestions for international cooperation are outlined.