Developing a logic of machine readable land and property transactions with the LADM standard

Every jurisdiction is unique in the way it determines the social value of rights which are defined in property law. Property law also describes the powers that a right holder has to grant, license, alienate, discharge, or vary a right through transactions. The relationships between parties and rights may be unique to a jurisdiction, while the abstract operations available through powers to change rights are broadly generic between jurisdictions. The Land Administration Domain Model (LADM (ISO TC/211, 2012)) is designed to describe rights relationships. However, as discussed by Tahar et al. (2023, p. 16): "the ISO 19152:2012 standard doesn’t specify how transactions or process workflows would be handled."
Beck & Xu, (2023)argue that the LADM revision should explicitly include transactional processes. They further argued that clarity is needed to support digital transformation in terms of foundational concepts, implementation patterns and generic business logic. Incorporation of such concepts within the LADM revision will support the ongoing digital programmes to transform Land Administration ecosystems. Such developments will be important for the digital reforms envisaged by United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) (UNECE, 2021; FAO et al., 2022). This includes the ambitious expectation of combining human and machine readable approaches that support the "real-time registration of transactions, largely subject to automatic digital checks only" (Principle 20 of UNECE (2021, p. 13)). If possible, hands-free machine-only transactions will require rigorous modelling and a first-order logic semantic representation to support automated reasoning and inferencing. Improved understanding and modelling of these processes will enhance operations within ecosystems and interoperability between jurisdictions.
This paper builds on the arguments presented by Beck & Xu, (2023)and proposes a general logic for machine readable Land and Property transactions. It will specifically describe transactions in the Land Registration domain that are required to support automated registration and UNECE Principle 20 UNECE (2021, p. 13). Transactional operations will be framed in terms of the core LADM concepts: Parties, Rights, and Land. Operational principles will be defined that determine whether a transactional request should be accepted or rejected.
Thanks are due to Keith Clifford-Bell, Duncan Moss and Vladimir Evtimov for their feedback which substantially improved this paper.