A Legal Cadastral Domain Model
During the last decade numerous attempts have been made to describe and discuss the cadastral domain on both national and international level. In this paper the term “legal cadastral domain” is used as a common term for laws and regulations regulating the content of traditional cadastre, multipurpose cadastre and land register storing legal real property information, regardless of any national differentiation between these registers. A problem towards description of the domain is that real property and cadastre are not homogeneous and standardised terms and different definitions are presented by several authors, see e.g. (FIG, 1995); (Kaufman and Steudler, 1998); (Silva and Stubkjaer, 2002). Such standardisation efforts are in addition primarily orientated towards technical storage environment of cadastre and other (software) solutions, but have, in my opinion, minor focus on legal aspects, even if the importance of the legal cadastral domain has been addressed by several authors, e.g. (Lemmen et al, 2003) and (Kaufman and Steudler, 1998). So, surprisingly little has been done to describe the legal issues of standardisation of real property information and cadastre.
Modelling of Land Privatisation Process in Belarus
Land privatisation is at the moment regarded as the main tool for land distribution in Belarus. Obviously, the process has to function smoothly and effortlessly from the user’s point of view. The paper addresses the land privatisation process in Belarus with aim to identify its drawbacks and pitfalls. It therefore assumes that land privatisation is overcomplicated as well as time-consuming and not adapted to the user’s needs process. Hence, there is an urgent need for simplification and, thereby, making the property market active and efficiently functioning.
Real Estate: Foundations of the Ontology of Property
Suppose you own a garden-variety object such as a hat or a shirt. Your property right then follows the ageold saw according to which possession is nine-tenths of the law. That is, your possession of a shirt constitutes a strong presumption in favor of your ownership of the shirt. In the case of land, however, this is not the case. Here possession is not only not a strong presumption in favor of ownership; it is not even clear what possession is. Possessing a thing like a hat or a shirt is a rather straightforward affair: the person wearing the hat or shirt possesses the shirt or the hat. But what is possession in the case of land? This essay seeks to provide an answer to this question in the form of an ontology of landed property.