Version 3: With terms and definitions from international standards

The conceptual filigree of the domain of cadastre and land administration has to bridge both institutional and legal diversity. In Continental Europe, cadastral mapping and recording of land parcels developed in service of the State, predominantly in terms of taxation of located assets. This practise did not gain foothold in common law countries, where corresponding institutions emerged as variations of the Torrens Title Register. Concepts of the domain are thus burdened with various focus on State vs focus on proprietary interest, as well as a corresponding legal diversity: civil law vs. common law. The situation in other cultures adds to this complexity.

Standards need cross-national English technical terms, indeed a challenge addressed by the ISO 19152:2012 Land Administration Domain Model (LADM), now under review. The wide scope of LADM provided the base for CaLAThe. A more technical perspective was elaborated by the Open Geospatial Consortium in terms of a Land and Infrastructure Conceptual Model Standard (LandInfra) with a set of corresponding encoding standards (InfraGML). The scope of LandInfra / InfraGML is land development and civil engineering infrastructure facilities, and the goal is to establish and document a common set of concepts that spans land and civil engineering infrastructure applications. This narrower scope of LandInfra compares to the notion of ‘cadastral survey’, an Anglo-American concept which relates the mapping of land parcels primarily to the securing of proprietary interest in land.

The present version is extended with defined concepts from the mentioned standards: About 10 LADM terms supplement the LADM-based terms of version 2, and about 30 terms are adopted from the Land Division and Condominium parts of LandInfra, raising the number of CaLAThe terms to almost 200. The mentioned parts of LandInfra in some cases suggests more appropriate terms for existing concepts. Thus, the existing term, Administrative feature, was replaced with Land Division, which is precicely the feature addressed. Similarly, the existing term, Spatial representation type, was replaced with Spatial unit, as Spatial unit is the abstract entity which provides the conceptual base for an array of boundary representations in 2 or 3 dimensions.

LandInfra's terms within the legal domain were initially drawn from the Legal Dictionary of Property in Canada. It addresses 'the presence of two systems of legal thought and legal rules in private law: Civil Law and Common Law,' as well as the two official languages, French and English. Of the 22 definitions adopted from dualjuridik.org, about half provided definitions to existing terms, while the remainder added to the thesaurus. Moreover, cooperation between an European Land Information Service (EULIS) and the European Land Registry Association (ELRA) provided a glossary of legal concepts, of which about 10 were added. A similar number of terms changed status to 'Alternative terms' and do not count among the 200 terms mentioned above, but are still visible together with the preferred term. Unfortunately, neither the 'dualjuridik.org' source nor the EULIS / ELRA glossary are available online any more, cf. dualjuridik.org, 2018EULIS, 2016. LandInfra also referred to the report Real Property Law and Procedure in the European Union, 2005, an outcome of the Real Property and Procedure in the European Union Project. The report served as the main reference for legal terms in the final editing of version 3.

CaLAThe intends to include terms of both civil law and common law jurisdictions. Therefore, using the  above-mentioned report on Real Property Law .. in the EU as the main legal reference implied insufficient concern for terms of Common Law. The ongoing revision of ISO LADM might provide a context for inclusion of terms used within the community framed by the Australian and New Zealand Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping (ICSM), cf. the Glossary of Terms of Land Victoria.

Cadastre and Land Administration comprises the observation and measurement of points, lines, surfaces and properties of features of interest, as well as the subsequent recording and reprocessing of these observations. This domain is covered by LandInfra through the Survey part, with subparts Observation, Equipment and SurveyResults, and through SpatialUnit and BoundingElements of the above mentioned LandDivision part. The present choice of what is included of this domain in CaLAThe is tentative; terms largely used in the context of software programming should not be included, but sufficient selection criteria are not yet established.