As a part of the GODAN Action-consortium, the Land Portal Foundation did a scoping study of land information providers online and how they classified or tagged their information. The main conclusions derived from the scoping study is that there is no structured or uniform approach practiced by the land governance community to publish information. The study also discovered a range of methods to classify the materials starting from no classification to a standard set of keywords.
Awareness about standards to classify data within the land sector is limited. Some organizations do not use topical keywords, and those that do have not designed these lists to be seen or used by other organizations. There is a clear gap in the use of standards for the land sector and the existence of standards specific to the land sector.
The Land Portal Foundation responded to this gap by leveraging AGROVOC, a multilingual and controlled vocabulary designed to cover concepts and terminology under the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) areas of interest. The intent was to enrich the concepts related to land within AGROVOC by building on existing land glossaries, such as the FAO’s Land Tenure Thesaurus (developed as a reference point for FAO staff), or the Land Administration Domain Model or the Global Land Indicators Initiative.
The Land Portal worked with the AGROVOC team to increase the 20 land-related concepts in AGROVOC to 300 unique concepts, excluding the added translations and synonyms. This particular set of land-governance related concepts in AGROVOC is now called "LandVoc - the linked land governance thesaurus."
LandVoc is expected to increase the visibility of land data and information and help how the land data is exchanged across the world. Additionally, it can serve as a reference document for translations and capture and understand the richness and complexity of land governance terms.
LandVoc can be a potent tool in making data and information more discoverable. It can connect knowledge and experiences from across the world, bridging both language and cultural barriers. The Land Portal Foundation intends LandVoc to be an unbranded linking tool between the different classification and tagging systems used by information providers in the land sector.
Click here to read the original article published by the International Federation of Surveyors, FIG.
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