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GIS & Land Administration

Building a land administration system for donor-funded projects — the domain, the standards, and the products that actually get deployed.

The mission

Build a GIS-backed system for international/donor-funded land projects (FAO, World Bank, UN-Habitat patterns). Concretely, be able to:

• Explain cadastre vs land registration, and say which half a given requirement belongs to
• Read an LADM (ISO 19152) class diagram and map a requirement onto LA_Party / LA_RRR / LA_BAUnit / LA_SpatialUnit
• Pick a stack for a donor project and defend it on cost, sustainability and donor-policy grounds
• Name the standards a donor RFP assumes — LADM, OGC services, fit-for-purpose principles — and what each obliges
• Sketch a parcel-and-rights data model without inventing terminology

Lessons

Fifteen lessons in two 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, adjustment. Each is short, cited, and ends in drills with immediate feedback; the drills are the point, not the prose.

Domain track

• Lesson 0001 · ~12 min Cadastre vs Registration

  Two halves of one system — spatial and legal — and the LADM class that joins them back together.

• Lesson 0002 · ~12 min Fit-For-Purpose

  The donor doctrine that makes your accuracy requirement a policy decision. General boundaries, three frameworks, incremental improvement.

• Lesson 0003 · ~12 min Systematic vs Sporadic

  Campaign or transaction. The adjudication pipeline, public display, objections — and the states a CRUD model does not have.

• Lesson 0004 · ~14 min Time and Mutation

  The parcel is not a stable entity and "current" is not a state. VersionedObject, two clocks, and what subdivision does to your tables.

• Lesson 0005 · ~13 min Publishing the Map

  WMS, WFS and the OGC API generation replacing them — plus the coordinate mistake that silently moves every parcel you own.

• Lesson 0006 · ~13 min Choosing the Stack

  Esri or open source, argued on sustainability rather than features. Both sides can lose; know how each one fails.

• Lesson 0007 · capstone · ~20 min Model the System

  Sketch the schema for a 40,000-parcel systematic campaign, then score it against a twelve-point checklist.

Engine track

• Lesson 0008 · ~14 min Spatial Reference

  Ellipsoid, datum, projection, EPSG — and the datum transformation everyone skips until parcels sit a hundred metres from the road.

• Lesson 0009 · ~13 min Georeferencing

  How a picture acquires coordinates: control points, transformation order, RMS, world files — and why orthorectified is a different word.

• Lesson 0010 · ~14 min Where Geometry Lives

  Geodatabase versus spatial extension. File/mobile/enterprise, versioning and archiving, PostGIS types and indexes — and who owns your rules.

• Lesson 0011 · ~15 min Topology and Topology Rules

  Nodes, edges, faces; the cadastral rule set; and cluster tolerance — the dial that silently rewrites coordinates during validation.

• Lesson 0012 · ~14 min COGO

  Boundaries as measurements rather than coordinates. Direction, distance, radius, arc length, bearing formats, and the closure check.

• Lesson 0013 · ~15 min Parcel Fabric

  Records and lineage, shared corner points, and least-squares adjustment — improving coordinates without touching legal dimensions.

• Lesson 0014 · ~13 min Spatial Networks

  Edges, junctions, turns and connectivity groups. Landlocked parcels, easements and team routing are all graph questions.

• Lesson 0015 · ~16 min LADM In Depth

  The full package map, LA_Level, spatial unit groups, boundary faces, the observation model, and the five parts of Edition II.

Reference

• Print me Domain cheat sheet

  LADM core, temporal pattern, mutation effects, FFP, registration modes, OGC services, CRS rules, stack decision — one page.

• Print me Engine cheat sheet

  Spatial reference stack, georeferencing, storage, topology rules and tolerance, COGO fields, parcel fabric, networks, LADM packages.

• Living document Glossary

  The vocabulary of land administration and its GIS products. Institutional terms, LADM classes, donor doctrine, technology.

Resources