Cloud, Mobile and Big Data Technologies in Responsible Land Administration
Geoff Hay Trimble Navigation, New Zealand
[email protected]
Paper prepared for presentation at the “2016 WORLD BANK CONFERENCE ON LAND AND POVERTY” The World Bank - Washington DC, March 14-18, 2016
Copyright 2016 by author(s). All rights reserved. Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies.
Abstract
The combination of cloud computing, big data analytics, Semantic Web technologies and mobile devices offers interesting new opportunities for the advancement of land registry and cadastral information systems implementation, theory and practice. These include, in particular, the cost effective provision and sharing of advanced services and facilities in resource poor situations, the improved availability of information and automation in processing, and hence sustainability of land information and administration, and potentially the faithful representation and timely recording of the true reality of land use and tenure in support of the fight against corruption and other goals associated with sustainability. This paper considers the way in which cloud technologies can be used to greater effect in the land administration domain and how theory and practice within the domain might be realigned with technology in order to support more effective, cheaper, and sustainable administration. In essence, new technology allows some conventions that place limitations on practice in the domain to be reconsidered – especially those which effectively restrict what can be represented and recorded. The ideas detailed in this paper are based on and extend those presented in a recently completed PhD thesis which introduces an instrument-centered theory of land administration.
Key Words: Big Data, Cloud Computing, Crowd Sourced, Land Administration, Land Information Systems
Introduction
While cloud computing is generally associated with computational resourcing and the treatment of information through reusable services and the scalable processing and storage of large volumes of data, new approaches to representation of registry and cadastral information are required to fully leverage the capabilities of these technologies in achieving advances and to address implied security, authenticity and other issues. Conventional representations and models underpinning cadastral and registry information are a constraint to the emergence of new theories and representations of cadastral and land registry information. This includes support for the potential heterogeneity (variety) of data in the cloud, and support for evolution in their representation and treatment − logically to be expected in a more open and expansive treatment made possible by crowd-sourced data and mobile and cloud technologies. This paper considers some of the difficulties of land administration in developing nations that may be addressed by cloud and related technologies in pursuit of sustainable and affordable development. The needs are driven by increasing demand for timely and up-to-date information delivered directly to customer’s devices in the field to support development and help address corruption. Difficulties include the integration of and support for variation in the representation and recordation of informal tenures and secondary rights and their coexistence with state created reality and conventional treatment, the mixing of spatial representations including ‘fit for purpose’ approaches, and the development, deployment and ongoing maintenance and evolution of systems and practice supporting highly available, heterogeneous, and voluminous information. All of which are occurring in situations where there may not be enough resources including expertise and financial, to support development and implementation of systems and their provisioning with up-to-date and reliable data – the same situations where such systems could do the most good in terms of poverty, corruption, and security of tenure. In this paper, the term ’cloud’ refers to the overriding concept of high availability of information which is achieved by replicating data and processes (or services) across physical devices and the ability to scale quickly in response to demand. The physical location of data and the way in which they may be replicated across virtualized servers is typically obscured although this does not necessarily mean that their physical location and their security cannot be controlled. The cloud is also associated with the provisioning of services which is considered in the next section. Due to the highly replicated nature of cloud data, updates and deletes are generally required only to be ‘eventually consistent’ (i.e. a read straight after an update may not show the updated information but subsequent reads will eventually show the update) rather than a full atomic consistency typical of conventional relational databases and GIS. This is an important issue in cloud-based systems especially for evidential record keeping. Rigorous consistency comes with high overheads especially in highly replicated and distributed environments. Relaxed consistency in favor of availability can still be considered in evidential systems as long as history is never accidently lost (which could occur when, for example, an overwrite operation is interrupted mid transaction). An append-only amendment-based model of information described below essentially prevents this kind of accident. The term ‘big data’ refers to the concept of data that originate and are combined from multiple disparate sources, the schema of which generally cannot be controlled or necessarily known in advance. The features of big data are its volume (lots of data), its velocity (the high rate of arrival of new data), and its variety (essentially variety in logical schema). Typically, these data are treated differently from
conventional relationally organised data. Differences relate to the storage and querying of schema variable data. These data are typically stored in non-relational databases that are based on key-value pairs and maps (lists of key-value pairs) rather than an overarching schema. The underlying importance of big data is in the timely discovery and exposure of new and useful information that may be of interest commercially as well as officially and which shows trends as they happen. This is a significant area of research. Querying of big data to expose emerging trends and relationships can be achieved with a mapreduce approach that also accounts for the variety, physical location and replication of data. The term ‘mobile technologies’ refers to devices that can be easily moved from location to location and which communicate over cellular and/or other wireless networks. These devices include consumer mobile phones, laptops, tablets and ‘smart’ devices that can run applications, access the Internet and are location aware. The location accuracy of these devices is constantly improving and it is expected that centimeter accuracy will soon be within their reach. In land surveying, these devices can significantly reduce the expense associated with setting out, capturing, adopting and sharing survey data in cloud-based collaborative work environments. Eventually, consumer devices may be more effective and even replace high-end survey equipment in certain kinds of areas and for certain types of task, for example, in rural areas and areas where first registration activities are taking place. Many developing nations adopting fit for purpose approaches, for example parcel creation via ‘best fit from orthophoto’ may find that these devices can be used to improve measurement precision markedly and very cheaply. The Semantic Web relates to technologies that address the meaning of data on the WWW through their implementation in Internet protocols. These technologies provide a logics-based representation of meaning (rather than the conventional domain model keyword-based representation). Logical representation allows more capability for machine processing including analysis and querying through rule-based reasoning over information as well as for the logical centralization of understanding which can be independent of the usage within value data. These technologies can be combined with cloud and mobile technologies in order to address issues associated with the meaning of highly schema variable data. Since these data can be stored and managed independently of value data from which they are referred, they may also be collaboratively managed and publically contributed. The term ‘responsible land administration’ extends the concept of land administration for the nation and its people to include the notion that land may be administered by the people or that the people might have more say and control over the organisation of land and what is to be recorded and how it is to be recorded. The concept might mean that the people control land independently of the state or that control is extended to include both state sanctioned and people sanctioned treatment. These notions are particularly relevant to situations where there is little or no recording of land tenure, where there is corruption and/or other tenure security issues, where the people do not agree with state sanctioned coverage, or where minorities, women and children, or extra-legal tenures and usages are marginalized by the current organisation of land. The implementation of these ideas is made more plausible by the technologies described above.
Cost Effective Provisioning Sustainability and authenticity in land administration is related to the public availability of cadastral and registry information. Cloud deployed information that is up-to-date potentially improves the availability
of information through its support for access across varying devices including mobile devices, its search and analysis capabilities, and its potential to scale in response to increasing demand. The concept of the cloud essentially relates to computational resourcing which includes the treatment and storage of large volumes of data, their high availability and low latency in their retrieval, and the provision of reusable services which includes the collection of fees. In land administration, many smaller nations experience difficulties in the provisioning of services and information to the public simply because of the costs and the time it takes to implement systems and deploy these data and services over the Internet. The concept of the cloud has the potential to address this problem because it allows countries to share physical infrastructure and facilities which might be provided by private enterprise. This potentially reduces the time it takes to setup and deploy a system. The cloud moves much of the infrastructure cost away from capital expense to operational expense. This, together with the idea that the cloud infrastructure supports the collection of fees and per-use charges, and the deployment of value added products, potentially allows for operational costs to be recovered and thus a system can potentially become financially self-supporting. In addition and perhaps more importantly, sharing of services (which here refers to software or processing components) allows the costs associated with their development and deployment to be also shared. In this regard, the cloud is another means by which countries can avoid ‘re-implementing the wheel’ by reusing and sharing implementation. This offers the potential for administrations to offer information services that they might not otherwise be able to provide or afford. Such services might include advanced analytics that glean new relationships and nuances, consideration of contributions and the generation of consequence in support of adjudication, integration between government and NGO datasets within and across jurisdictions, workflow management and design facilities and infrastructure, and reuse of common or generic workflow tasks, and services associated with subscription and notification. Other facilities that might be made available and may be required as jurisdictions evolve in their requirements include, for example: 3D extraction, modeling, representation and visualization services; census collection, research and analysis services; short-term leasing services; driver licensing and car registration; and household registers.
Automation in Processing Although there is much about land administration that is consistent across the world, e.g. the use of maps and documents, there is also much that is variable across jurisdictions. While land administration is generally regarded as a ‘process’ and processes in land administration essentially achieve the same things (e.g. the transfer or subdivision of land), the particular practice and treatment surrounding these processes tend to vary markedly across jurisdictions making their implementation difficult to transport. Processes have social (relating to local laws and historic practice) and technical (relating to things like spatial databases and spatial operations) aspects. It is the social aspects that vary the most with the technical aspects being less variable and more consistent across jurisdictions. This implies that there are parts of processes that can be reused. The concept of ‘tool boxes’ to support the implementation of that which is general, and the use of free and open source software and components are therefore relevant to the technical aspects of land information processing and also to deployment in the cloud.
Processing of land transactions is an important topic in land administration. Keeping land information upto-date with timely and cheap transactions is a key ingredient of sustainable land administration. Ultimately, online land transaction services and processing is a requirement of responsible land administration. A cloud implementation and deployment addresses the expectation that processing will need to scale quickly to meet high and rapidly increasing demand especially as the use of smart devices increases. Workflow management systems (WfMSs) provide for the design, deployment, and execution of process definitions as well as the management, audit, and performance of running processes. A WfMS provides the basis of highly configurable implementation and allows much that is general to be reused and to be mixed with that which is highly specific. Processes can also be implemented as ‘hardcoded’ software state machines (see state pattern) which are suitable for those processes that do not change often. Such implementation is more efficient at runtime and consumes fewer resources than WfMS based processes, and perhaps most importantly, are easily developed with ‘boiler plate’ internet technology (e.g. Java Servlets). Services, in a software as a service (SaaS) model, provide online distributed access to discrete functions that perform generic or specific tasks which can be categorized into update, retrieval or calculation. The concept of services in a service oriented architecture (SOA) ‘separates concerns’ in support of reuse and composition. Service implementations may be reused across process definitions and may be composed into more advanced services and applications. Service implementations can be shared across client implementations, can be traded and licensed, and maintained independently of users. An architectural treatment that focusses on process and that allows change only in the context of, and only through the action of, legal software services helps ensure not only consistency and authenticity of data, but also allows additional automation to be included as part of a process, for example, rule-based and algorithmic consistency checking, or notifications to other agencies and subscribed stakeholders. The notion of a cloud ‘platform’ dedicated to land administration is one that appeals for a number of reasons and it is a natural progression from the concept of land administration services in the cloud. The concept of a land administration platform is discussed below.
Faithful Recording Faithful recording of land information is the idea that the recording of ground truth is not distorted by the requirements of technology used to record information, i.e. the systems that process and store information. In particular it implies that all that can be known about land and its linkages with people can and should be recorded. The nature and practices of traditional western land administration are largely a result of the requirements of paper-based administration practice. A prime example of this is the Torrens system of title registration which eases the administration of land by essentially only supporting a small set of documents and interests over land. For those people in situations involving customary, extra-legal, secondary or less formal interests in land, this introduces conflicts and arguments, and potentially war, and means that processes of adjudication and legal actions that take time and resources to resolve occur often.
The basic requirements for document management and processing have not changed with the move to digital recording despite the fact that computer technology introduces new difficulties in dealing with documents and their processing. One example of this is the need that documents are immutable in order to preserve their authenticity as evidence which is at odds with the most prolific document storage device (databases) where the information making up a document may be split across tables and can be easily copied, altered and deleted. This is of course only a problem when document content is explicitly represented in database attributes and tables and not when content is only held in human-readable form (i.e. scanned images of documents), which however, also means that search, retrieval and automation are severely limited. The faithful representation and recording of interests is somewhat at odds with ‘fit for purpose’ approaches in that the accuracy and precision of spatial information is reduced in order to fit with current needs of local administration hereby reducing costs and improving timeliness associated with implementation and deployment of data and systems. This introduces the possibility for disputes in the future and implies a requirement for ongoing regressive improvement and refinement. Interestingly, a cloud and contributed approach more easily supports fit for purpose spatial information, more so than conventional databases and official processes – as long as the issues with publically contributed information can be resolved reliably. The increasing location and measurement accuracy of mobile technology has the potential to change the practice of land surveying by enabling the possibility for nonsurveyors to conduct and submit surveys using these devices.
Contributed Information In developing nations, a number of difficulties exist that hinder efforts to improve effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability of land information system development and deployment efforts, either in initial moves from manual practices and systems to digital systems, or in efforts to improve coverage and effectiveness of existing systems. Aside from problems associated with the provision of systems, the primary problem is related to the data. Often, data relating to land ownership and use are confounded, inconsistent, and incomplete and it is often difficult to determine their accuracy. Where data relating to land do exist, they are often limited to records of rights with little or no reliable spatial information. Other difficulties include corruption and issues associated with moves to individualized conclusive titles in developing nations which cause disputes, land grabs, and which clog the courts with litigation. These difficulties have many impacts for poorer inhabitants and secondary right holders. The use of mobile technology as a means by which information relating to land may be contributed, enhanced and maintained by the public and NGOs has the potential to help improve this situation. Crowd sourced information contributed through mobile technologies in participatory approaches is an example of a new approach to land information collection and enhancement. Resource mapping, planning and first registration activities are examples where ‘crowd sourcing’ of land information has been applied. The idea of ‘narratives’ relating to places, times and events, and where any person can contribute historical information and stories from the past is one that is interesting and potentially of great value to many people. The recording of oral histories and their importance as evidence supporting tenure and claims cannot be denied. Their timely recording is of utmost importance otherwise this information will be quickly lost forever.
A current topic in land administration is the concept of information that arrives from other than traditional sources. Such information includes contributed and volunteered information from the public but this can also include information from other government organisations and private agencies, examples are, BIM models developed as part of building and infrastructure construction projects, permits associated with land use, mining, agriculture, forestry, building control information, and information held by government organisations relating to restrictions and responsibilities over land and land use. Information and data sourced from modern devices and technologies may also be made available in cloud and big data environments, for example, spatial information from sensors, drones, private GPS devices, and cameras. Other sources include information that can be derived from remotely sensed data through automated processes of classification, segmentation, feature extraction, and change detection. Making these data available together with official cadastral and land registry information and, knowing that all information about land and individual properties can be reliably and conveniently retrieved is a difficulty in many jurisdictions. A real-time up-to-date inventory of all land in a jurisdiction or country is a need that is often not met in even the most developed nations. Achieving these goals is easier in cloud environments essentially because the required data sources and services are (or can be made) easily accessable in a secure and platform independent way. The registration and the recording of people-land relationships for land administration purposes through participatory approaches is a current topic in land administration. While the idea of providing for the recording of claims regarding individual occupancy, tenure and land use is considered a potential useful and efficient means of capturing previously unknown or unobtainable information, the practical implementation is still rather limited by the fact that such knowledge must be captured within a preexisting understanding of the domain, i.e. the concepts and rules on which recording is based usually in the form of a domain model or schema. This understanding might be captured in advance through survey, derived from existing knowledge, or imposed by authorities. The concept of crowd sourcing of information could be extended to include information relating to the understanding of a domain, that is, the underlying terminology including the concepts, roles, structures, rules, and organisations of land associated with the often hidden understandings and organisations of land. These hidden understandings and their agreements include those found in extra-legal and informal contexts but also those that may be ignored in customary or traditional contexts due to their complexity, variety, and fluidity. The concept of emergence where contributors may influence or contribute to the underlying understanding of the domain is a logical extension of the participatory crowd sourcing approach to information collection and enhancement. The collection of such information requires that this information can be represented in a formal way that supports multiple representations and analysis. A natural progression of participatory approaches in land administration is the notion that the objects of land including both cognitive and physical objects, and the concepts of land could be represented and organised in a similar manner to Facebook or LinkedIn pages – essentially a web of linkages between objects which can be navigated by both humans and computational processes. Conventional representation and implementation provides little in the way of facility for the analysis of contributed information that might support determination of authenticity and adjudication. The combination of cloud services and big data style analytics, together with Semantic Web technologies provides for such implementation to be considered. Consideration of contributed evidence and the number of supporting claims and counter claims relating to a holding, the kind and relevance of supporting
documents, together with factual evidence obtained from official sources, can be automated within a semantic and/or a rule reasoning framework in support of adjudication and other processes of land administration, and especially in support of those people facing tenure security issues relating to land rushes, greed and, in particular, corruption. As long as people can contribute to the understanding of a domain (and not just its data) then the relevance and weight of such things as documents and other evidences can be determined through these contributions, thus providing for automated reasoning to support effective and timely adjudication and address attempts to provide misleading or incorrect information. The vocabularies of official information and systems are usually ‘set in stone’ by law and are coded within systems. Vocabulary may be collected in advance of participation projects or may be determined during or after information collection. For participatory approaches the vocabulary may differ from the legally relevant vocabulary and so may need to be reconciled with or mapped to official vocabulary.
Faithful Representation Faithful representation relates to the way in which the understanding of a domain enshrined in digital systems reflects the reality on the ground. Although primarily relating to terminology, it also includes the structural associations between terms and between records, and the structures of records representing real world and cognitive objects. Ultimately it includes also the representation of time which is discussed below. A faithful representation implies that there will be much variation in the terminology underlying land administration data and especially crowd-sourced information and in its combination with official and other sourced information. The same term may be used to represent different things, or the same thing may be represented by a number of different terms. Databases, domain models and conventional practice in general however, typically limit representation to single meanings (i.e. only one term for each concept or role) and the representation format is usually textual and thus analysis and search are limited to string matching. Open models that place less restriction on what can be recorded go some way to addressing the problems of what can be recorded however this introduces problems relating to the after-the-fact understanding of what is recorded – especially so for querying and analysis. The STDM is an example of an ‘open’ model that places less restriction on what is recorded. It moves away from a specific domain model where the domain entities and their relationships are modeled explicitly in schemata to one where the exact entities and relationships are described within the data. This is especially true for the ‘social tenure relationships’ entity in the model. The model is simple in the sense that only four abstract entities are required. The STDM does not explicitly model time and does not provide for reasoning over the recorded information other than that which might be provided by database query and keyword matching over recorded data. The faithful and responsible representation of the understandings of land should naturally include all variations and permutations of terminology and allow for their coexistence within some logical framework that also allows the relationships between terminological descriptions to be represented. Such a representation facilitates querying, analysis and reliable retrieval, and opens the door for more
automation in support of determination and decision making relating to adjudication of claims. Semantic representation also brings logic to infer new facts from existing information. There have been calls within the cadastral domain for such a logic-based representation of the domain semantics (see, for example, Bošković et al., 2010; Stubkjær and Stuckenschmidt, 2000). Ontology can serve as a shared vocabulary for semantic interoperability within the cadastral domain and as an alternative to grammar-based representations and the object-based representations. In particular, Stubkjær and Stuckenschmidt (2000) note the worthwhile advantages of an ontological approach to the problems of heterogeneity within the cadastral domain, including clearer notions and a solid basis for the integration and co-ordination of standards and processes. The vision for the Semantic Web was for the content of the Web to be available in a more machine processable form. This is achieved by annotating content with terms defined in ontologies. Through these terms and their linkages and associations with logical consequence, ontologies provide a way of enriching descriptive information about information sources and data so that the semantics of their content become machine processable. This potentially allows for a reduction in the amount of information that needs to be explicitly declared in advance, in particular, the structure of records or the relationships between terms referred to in records, since some information can be inferred after the fact. For models such as the Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM) (Augustinus, 2007), terms and relationship roles could be moved to ontology and referred to with URI in records. This would open a range of facilities supporting search and analysis including inference over recorded information to produce new information. In particular, cloud data management and big data analytic techniques can more easily be applied when the semantic associations are made explicit. Other models in the GIS domain take a similar approach to the STDM although they go a step further by moving the logical model to one that is based on concepts of time rather than abstractions of domain entities. An example is the three domain model proposed by Yuan (1996a, 1999),which separates domains of space and time to address the problems of complexity associated with changing spatial and topological properties of features, as well as time-varying aspatial properties. By separating dimensions of space, time, and semantics, complexity, variability and evolution in the domain can be addressed. This allows variability across records in what is stored and represented, and in the structural associations between records by reducing reliance on predefined domain schema. The semantics descriptions of a domain are stored independently of the structures of data allowing these to vary independently. Importantly, the descriptions are decoupled from, and thereby not impacted by usage or change in usage within instance data. The way in which usage has changed over time can also be examined. Time Time, its representation and the recording of change in land related information an ongoing issue that has not seen a plausible and general solution (O’Sullivan, 2005). Conventional GISs and LISs typically do not explicitly represent time. Change is recorded through the time-stamping of scanned documents and spatial records thereby making analysis of change and temporal queries difficult. In land administration, time is a critical component in the concepts of land and RRR. The attributes of land, RRR, and people, are both time-varying and time dependent in that they may change in value over time and are subject to temporal rules (for example ownership may not overlap in time). In addition, over time the form of attributes and their meaning may change, existing attributes may be replaced, new attributes may be introduced, and
new forms of property, RRR, rules and procedures may be introduced or emerge. This is the impact of evolution within the domain being modelled. RRR, parties and places, and the thematic attributes associated with land have a temporal dimension that imposes significant additional complexity for representation. Particular RRR may be valid for particular time periods (e.g. a lease or right of use), may be valid for all time, or from a particular time point for an unknown period. Places may change in their spatial extent and other attributes over time, and parties may change in their formation and kind. Only one person or group can own a place at a particular time and the particular ownership and other rights may change often. The documents and transactions pertaining to land information point backwards and forwards through time and connect, for example, buyers with sellers, and changes in the spatial extent of land objects. It is in the need to represent change that time becomes indispensable to the representation of a domain. Time is an essential dimension to record, analyze and understand the evolution of real world phenomena, and to provide an authentic and evidential historical record. It is therefore logical that superseded data created by continuous updating are retained although historically this was considered impractical due to storage constraints and factors associated with complexity. Cloud and big data technologies allow the implementation of time to be reconsidered. Representing exactly what changed and when, in order to answer detailed queries regarding change (such as, for example, finding all parcels affected by a particular change) requires an explicit temporal representation. The representation of both space and time along with the domain thematics have long been considered significantly more difficult than the representation of these aspects singly (Peuquet, 1994, 2001). Modelling the temporal aspects of data as first class entities within domain models is another approach that has been well researched. An event-based model for implementing time explicitly models events (changes in the state of the system under investigation) as first class entities, allowing an efficient and more complete storage of history (Peuquet and Duan, 1995; Chen, J. and Jiang, 2000). These models attempt to unify spatial data with temporal data so that spatial change can be analysed, and elevate the concept of ‘happenings’ to an equal status to ‘things’ (Worboys, 2005). Event models have been proposed for modelling changes in the extent and topology of spatial objects representing cadastral data although they do not model changes in related aspatial information (Chen and Jiang, 2000, 1998). Instantaneous events can be represented with an absolute dating system where each event is stamped with a time stamp. Events may model transactions that affect the current state of a domain and are usually related to records defining the change in value of domain data.
The Platform Concept The vision of a land administration platform ‘as a service’ is one that might benefit many countries, jurisdictions, or municipal authorities. Such a platform would provide additional and extended infrastructure and services that relieve the client of the burden of physical infrastructure setup and maintenance, software development and maintenance, data backup and recovery, and other generic activities associated with infrastructure in digital land administration. It moves many costs away from capital to operational expense and development and maintenance activities become configuration
activities. Such a platform potentially allows sharing of facilities and implementation between cooperating jurisdictions, and for partnerships that further reduce the costs for land administrators and land occupiers. A platform also potentially aids the integration of government data simply through the improved availability of suitable base map data, models, processes, and facilities. The instrument-centred land administration application architecture is one definition for the basis of such a platform (Hay, 2014). In that architecture, the concept of an ‘instrument’ represents agreed and shared understanding (for example, a law or oral tradition) and an instrument contains, directly or through reference, definitions of terminology (concepts and roles), processes (e.g. land transfer - what can occur and the way in which it is to occur), and the structures of data (e.g. document definitions). The platform is centred on the notion that an instrument, whether it is an instrument of prescription (e.g. a law) or an instrument of data update or retrieval, it is always implemented as a process. A prescriptive instrument is implemented as an evolution process that changes the system by adding new terminology and land transaction process definitions (transaction instruments) which might include new software modules or services. A transaction instrument defines how value data may be changed, and an instantiation changes actual value data within the system, for example, a land subdivision instrument is instantiated when a customer wishes to subdivide a land parcel. These ideas allow a highly configurable and evolvable notion of land administration and land information system, and one that is highly suitable for cloud based deployment, to be considered. The platform takes a number of architectural decisions and directions that are less conventional in order to achieve an easily evolvable (and therefore easily transportable) implementation. Data are held not under a specific domain model but under a generic bi-temporal logical model based on concepts of identity, events and amendment (similar to accounting practice). The resource description framework (RDF) is employed and together with the bi-temporal logic allows for a highly generic and cloud friendly model of data. Essentially all data are represented within the same logical model. That which might vary across records is held externally (e.g. terminology is held in a separate ontology perspective) or can be inferred from actual data (structures of data can be inferred from actual data or via references to uniquely identifiable software modules). The structures of data (e.g. documents structures and entity-relationships) are highly variable across location and time. The structures are therefore only imposed through the action of processes (and specialized services) that change value data. The structures that exist in data may be determined through interrogation and/or through specialized services that reassemble or convert objects such as documents. The platform takes the concept of time to its logical and very practical conclusion. Delete or overwrite of data, and indeed implementation, does not make sense. All data are retained and retained in such a way as to allow their meaning (i.e. particular conceptual schema), and the particular arrangement of software artifacts associated with their creation and management, to evolve. A particular record is forever associated with any software modules (services) that have impacted its form. This leads to the implication that the structure of a record, the terminology that it refers to, and the software artifacts related to its existence, may vary across each record. In addition, it leads to the notion that a software platform is not a single monolithic implementation but an ever-growing accumulation of uniquely identified and identifiable software modules. The cloud is obviously the only suitable and practical medium for such a model of information and system.
Such a model of time requires an explicit logic for amendment. This is because the temporal model forbids delete or overwrite (of anything) in much the same way that accounting practice requires that the complete history be retained. An amendment-based approach to data update is adopted that is similar to that used in accounting practice, and to that proposed for the recording of spatial change (Langran and Chrisman, 1988). Events and amendments naturally align with the notions of transaction-time and validtime respectively, to an append-only model for information, and to a more complete recording of truth in relation to stored data. An append-only architecture essentially requires the concept of amendment to support retrospective and post-active updates. In particular, where an incorrect value is placed into the state, a corrective amendment may be applied that does not hide the fact that an incorrect value existed and was considered correct for some period of time. Such information may be exposed when queries are expressed in terms of transaction or valid time. Events may also describe the creation and retirement of entities and may impose specialized amendments that describe parent/child associations between entities. An event-amendment-based model allows transaction-time and valid-time to be modeled independently and allows the construction of a range of complex temporal queries, including those that implement concepts such as what was known then about the time being considered and what is known now about the time being considered. The proposed temporal model is based on linearly ordered events that are specified and instantiated by processes, and which impose change on the state of individual records including their creation. The approach to representation of individuals (or information entities) corresponds to the perdurantist view from analytical metaphysics in that all entities are made up of temporal parts and are fully defined by their parts (Welty et al., 2005; Raper, 2000; Krieger et al., 2008). The parts correspond to the effect of events which may cause an information entity to come into existence, may amend its temporal attributes including retiring or invalidating them, and may cause the entity to disappear (actually, to be retired). This approach allows complex object histories to be described and is similar to those suggested by Welty et al. (2005) and Krieger et al. (2008). The logical model includes the abstract concept of an information identity to represent any unique domain phenomenon that is able to be uniquely identified, i.e. individuals in the domain. For example, an identity can represent an instance of a legal property object, a title document, a process that has occurred, a person or organisation, or a geometric object representing the boundary of a land parcel. This is a slight departure from previous approaches in that no notion of the actual type of an object (the identity) for which events occur, is included in the logical model. This allows for the logical model to be fully decoupled from the specific types and semantics of domain phenomena and thus it is relevant to any temporal domain. An identity associates events and is fully defined by the events which describe its creation, its state, changes in its state, and its types. This includes its set of declared actual types and its types that can be inferred from its associations, which might change over-time. This concept of an abstract identity is able to more closely model the real world phenomena it represents since real phenomena may have multiple types and these may change over time, for example, a ‘person’ is also a ‘property owner’ during those time periods when a property is recorded as being ‘owned by’ that owner. An identity is inherently an inferred temporal object since its existence within the data begins with an event and it may be retired from use through another event, whether it has time-varying state or not. By formalizing the concept of identity and identity-based change through an event-based implementation of multi-threaded linear time, complex object histories are able to be described (Welty et al., 2005).
The result of all of this is that the model is eminently suitable for cloud deployment. Replication is easily achieved because the ‘fragments’ of data (termed ‘model’) themselves are simple – each model is composed of a small set of RDF statements comprising an event and one or more amendments. These are easily searched and interrogated by analysis functions. References between fragments such as between events, and between events and amendments, between amendments existing in different event fragments, between value data and ontology descriptions such as roles and concepts, and to separately stored documents and geometries, are all URI references and thus easily navigated and resolved with conventional machinery.
Conclusion The vision described here is one of land tenure and administration that has evolved in response to evolution in the technology that connects people with information and the technology for representing and recording connections to land. The connection between people and information lies in their participation through the high availability of information and in their contribution and investment in that information. The technologies referred to provide the means by which the representation, recording and ongoing maintenance of land information can more faithfully reflect and evidence ground truth. This includes a more inclusive recording of the associations between people and land, a contributed and evolving representation of the meaning of these associations and concepts of land, and, an up-to-date account of land achieved through timely, responsive and cost efficient processes and transactions. The advantages of cloud-based deployments for developing nations begin with the potential savings in infrastructure capital and operating costs and savings in the cost of software and process development to support the provision and high availability of up-to-date land information to underpin sustainable land administration and development. These savings can be achieved through cooperation and sharing between countries or jurisdictions of the deployment and its costs. The cost savings and benefits to be obtained from cloud-based deployments can be more fully realized when the logical models underpinning the stored information can also be reused and shared which allows the processing modules and services to also be more easily shared and reused. There are many approaches to achieving a shared logic, examples are: change the reality on the ground to a homogenous and simplified form; conform to a standardized domain model, i.e. the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) (ISO 19152); or use an open model, e.g., STDM, Instrumentcentered temporal model). However, it is only through the use of a model that supports the underlying concepts of the cloud that the real benefits of such technology can be realized. Such a model should allow for variability and evolution in the concepts, roles and structures of data and allow for those that are represented in the data to influence not only their values but also their meanings, i.e. the concepts, roles and structures that underlie data values. This implies that these meanings can exist and be enshrined in information and systems before and externally to their recognition by state. The gatekeeping and control of data updates and the resolution of conflicts and conflicting information, therefore, have to be implemented with less specific knowledge of the potential conflicts or of actual instances and their particular meaning. Open models that support the improved representation of meaning (including time) potentially allow such a situation to be considered.
The semantic technologies including contributed ontology, domain-independent data representation, and rule-based reasoning support such ideas. The concept of crowd-sourcing might therefore be extended to include not only data but also meaning (in the form of concept and role descriptions) and the structural and processing descriptions (perhaps in the form of rules) that apply to those meanings. In addition, the treatment of information described here, calls into question the traditional belief that land is ultimately best held in discrete individualized ownership and that the ultimate state of land administration looks similar to western jurisdictions with discrete parcel based individualized ownership. The alternative could be much more interesting and heterogeneous. A land holding might be represented as a set of ‘claims’ in 2D, 3D or 4D space, for example, each person in a family and/or a village may make a claim and these may intersect and overlap in space and time. The actual ‘footprint’ for any one claimant would be a consequent space determined through automated analysis and consideration of supporting and conflicting claims. The resulting consequence might be a set of, for example, geometries defining a continuum of possibilities representing the least likely through to most likely correct spatial area relating to a claim, or a continuum ranging from areas for which a claim is not contested to areas for which there are competing and/or conflicting claims. Such a representation might extend further into the 4th dimension by representing claimants that passed on rights through inheritance and those that are expected to receive rights through inheritances. Land holders might aspire to full ownership title to their land, recording their current status and rights are also important and a responsible organisation will allow eventual evolution of recorded interests. The cloud concept also allows for information to be systematically enhanced and supplemented with information from other sources which might be other government agencies or commercial agencies and for societal or commercial purposes. The supplementary information might add commercial value and so provide a source of income for all the involved providers. Agencies holding data can therefore look beyond just the value of their own data in terms of its costs of collection and maintenance, and at how they recover costs individually, and try to look at its value in terms of how their information might be reused, extended, supplemented and repackaged to produce new income streams that might actually relieve land holders of some of the costs of administration. This reuse and repackaging of contributed information also potentially provides an income stream for infrastructure and software providers and the possibility of service agreements and concession arrangements that further reduces costs to stakeholders. States may have to reconsider the meaning and purpose of land information and the systems that support it. No longer can such information be held solely for the purposes of the state to support the gathering of taxes and control of land through RRR. Land information must (under the umbrellas of ‘responsible’, ‘authentic’, ‘sustainable’) now support many other purposes and responsibilities including not only the interests of individual and organizational land owners, but also the interests of women, children, minorities, and potentially even those of the environment, animals and nature. It might eventuate that the power of organised populations might extend the use of such land accounting and enforcement to areas beyond man-made borders and artifacts to include features that are of common interest to all such as rivers and their sources, the oceans and fisheries, and wildness areas.
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