A SKOS vocabulary for Linked Land Administration: Cadastre and Land Administration Thesaurus

Abstract

Intensification of international communication calls for multilingual terminology databases and other linguistic tools. The World Wide Web Consortium framed the further specification of the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), which is a formal language designed for standardized representation of structured vocabularies, as well as the Linked Data methodology of publishing structured data in a machine-readable and interlinked way, that they become more useful. Applying the Linked Data approach, the European Commission recently established e-Government Core Vocabularies. This paper describes the development of a Knowledge Organization System (KOS) in terms of a thesaurus for the domain of cadastre and land administration. The main purpose is to contribute towards the development of 'Linked Land Administration' that adopts Linked Data technologies for semantic management of datasets kept in public registries, and scholarly and legislative resources kept in libraries. The proposed controlled vocabulary in SKOS format may be used for specifying metadata records of scholarly and legislative resources, as well as enrichment of these resources through semantic annotations. It also provides a base for further ontology development initiatives. The thesaurus is mainly derived from terms of the standard ISO 19152:2012 Land Administration Domain Model, which represents the static aspect of the domain. Reports of the project Property Formation in the Nordic countries (Kort og Matrikelstyrelsen, 2006) provide the basis for the temporal or activity aspect of the domain, while the ANSI/NISO, 2005 Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies provided methodological advice. The thesaurus consists of 143 terms, the relations of which are recorded according to the mentioned SKOS standard. About one fourth of the terms are adopted from existing thesauri, including the AGROVOC multilingual agricultural vocabulary, the GEMET Thesaurus with INSPIRE Spatial Data Themes, and the STW Thesaurus for Economics. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.