Course home
Building a land administration system for donor-funded projects — the domain, the standards, and the products that actually get deployed.
Build a GIS-backed system for international/donor-funded land projects (FAO, World Bank, UN-Habitat patterns). Concretely, be able to:
LA_Party / LA_RRR / LA_BAUnit / LA_SpatialUnitEighteen lessons in three tracks. Domain (0001–0007) is the institutional and doctrinal layer — what the system is for. Engine (0008–0015) is the machinery underneath — coordinates, storage, topology, dimensions, networks. Depth (0016–0018) goes further into volumes, adjustment statistics and imagery at scale. Each is short, cited, and ends in drills with immediate feedback; the drills are the point, not the prose.
Two halves of one system — spatial and legal — and the LADM class that joins them back together.
The donor doctrine that makes your accuracy requirement a policy decision. General boundaries, three frameworks, incremental improvement.
Campaign or transaction. The adjudication pipeline, public display, objections — and the states a CRUD model does not have.
The parcel is not a stable entity and "current" is not a state. VersionedObject, two clocks, and what subdivision does to your tables.
WMS, WFS and the OGC API generation replacing them — plus the coordinate mistake that silently moves every parcel you own.
Esri or open source, argued on sustainability rather than features. Both sides can lose; know how each one fails.
Sketch the schema for a 40,000-parcel systematic campaign, then score it against a twelve-point checklist.
Ellipsoid, datum, projection, EPSG — and the datum transformation everyone skips until parcels sit a hundred metres from the road.
How a picture acquires coordinates: control points, transformation order, RMS, world files — and why orthorectified is a different word.
Geodatabase versus spatial extension. File/mobile/enterprise, versioning and archiving, PostGIS types and indexes — and who owns your rules.
Nodes, edges, faces; the cadastral rule set; and cluster tolerance — the dial that silently rewrites coordinates during validation.
Boundaries as measurements rather than coordinates. Direction, distance, radius, arc length, bearing formats, and the closure check.
Records and lineage, shared corner points, and least-squares adjustment — improving coordinates without touching legal dimensions.
Edges, junctions, turns and connectivity groups. Landlocked parcels, easements and team routing are all graph questions.
The full package map, LA_Level, spatial unit groups, boundary faces, the observation model, and the five parts of Edition II.
Apartments, tunnels and air rights as legal volumes. LA_BoundaryFace, legal space versus physical space, and sourcing geometry from IFC.
Inside least squares: weights, redundancy, variance factor, error ellipses, and Baarda's data snooping for finding the one bad measurement.
SfM to orthomosaic, DSM versus DTM, and how to store, catalogue and serve terabytes: Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF and STAC.
LADM core, temporal pattern, mutation effects, FFP, registration modes, OGC services, CRS rules, stack decision — one page.
Spatial reference stack, georeferencing, storage, topology rules and tolerance, COGO fields, parcel fabric, networks, LADM packages.
The vocabulary of land administration and its GIS products. Institutional terms, LADM classes, donor doctrine, technology.
Trust tiers: A primary/normative · B peer-reviewed · C vendor/practitioner.