International Code List Management: The Case of Land Administration

Standardization reduces technical barriers to trade and foster dissemination of innovations. Within the domain of information technology, standardization enhances semantic interoperability of systems and services. In order to achieve the potential of standardization, IT solutions must be localized to adapt to local needs. To reduce localization costs, software developers, but also standards develop and adopt internationalization principles and best practices, cf. the W3C Internationalization (I18n) Activity, the ISO 639 Language Codes, which provides an example for code lists and code list management, and the coding of coordinate reference systems.
For the domain of Land Administration, the localization issue extends from language names to the various organizations and institutions dealing with interests in land. Paasch et al (2013) propose code lists as a mean of internationalization by which the classes of the ISO 19152:2012 Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) may be related to the concerned jurisdiction. The issue of code lists has been addressed by the OGC as well, namely in terms of the document 17-050r1 Code List Manifesto by Paul Scarponcini. Motivations for the study include that various OGC standards have encoded enumerations and code lists differently, as realized during the development of the InfraGML standard, which regards land and civil engineering infrastructure facilities, and thus share part of its scope with LADM.
Aiming at harmonization of standards within the domain of Land Administration, the present paper proposes a joint management of the code lists which are specified by ISO LADM and by OGC LandInfra / InfraGML, respectively. The FIG motivated the ISO standard LADM and moreover framed research on code lists. It seems therefore appropriate to join with this organization of surveying professionals, also to benefit from sharing of expertise and cost of the management activities. The paper the outlines the tasks of code list management by drawing on the mentioned Code List Manifesto and resuming research supporting code list management, e.g. terminological theory and semantic tools. The setup of a possible code list management system is discussed, and summarized in terms of a draft Memorandum of Understanding.