From the outset of CaLAThe, a main concern has been to develop the law part of the thesaurus in a way that facilitated cooperation with the legal profession. The Legal Dictionary of Property in Canada, which reflects the presence of two systems of legal thought and legal rules in private law: Civil Law and Common Law, was applied for version 1, but is not available online any more. The final editing of version 3 was thus based on the report Real Property Law and Procedure in the European Union, 2005, with the implication that 'Land tenure' and other Common Law terms were not included in CaLAThe. Having added definitions to most of CaLAThe terms during previous revisions, this version addresses the lack of Common Law terms. The two legal systems: Common Law and Civil Law, are explicitly introduced and nearly 10 Common Law terms with definitions are added, while largely keeping the thesaurus structure unchanged.
This version further improves multilingualism of CaLAThe by adding Dutch terms. The Dutch equivalents of CaLAThe concepts were prepared by Alexandra Rowland (EngD), Thies Mesdag (MSc) and Annie Bosman-Besten.
In addition, occacional revision of relations and definitions were made; especially in the Survey part the logic of narrower relations have been critically reviewed. Like version 6, the present version is not supplemented with code list data, still awaiting outcomes of the revision of the ISO 19152:2012 Land Administration Domain Model (LADM).
Alexandra Rowland, Thies Mesdag and Annie Bosman-Besten from the The Netherlands’ Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency (Kadaster) for providing the Dutch terms to the CaLAThe concepts.
We are grateful to Prof. Dr. Burak Akpinar for his continued technical support of the periodic updating of CaLAThe.