Linked Open Data for Land Governance, by Neil Sorensen
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Agricultural Data Interest Group (IGAD) Pre-Meeting Agenda Research Data Alliance 21st to 22nd September 2015 INRA, Paris (France)
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Linked Open Data for Land Governance, by Neil Sorensen
- 1. Linked Open Data for Land Governance Neil Sorensen
- 7. The Land Portal and Open Development Mekong
Editor's Notes
- The Land Portal journey began twenty years ago as a collaborative effort among several organizations that wanted to address the fragmentation of information on land governance, which was longstanding problem limiting development and keeping people, especially those who are the most vulnerable, including smallholder farmers and indigenous peoples, from obtaining secure and equitable access to land. The initiative was originally called BELTS and then later became landtenure.info . The idea has always been establishing a platform that could facilitate the access to information on land governance supported by a partnership of land concerned stakeholders ranging from universities and research institutes, civil society organizations and NGOs, government and multilateral organizations and media and private sector partners. Partners founded their work on a theory of change stating that although there is a wealth of information and data online about land governance, their visibility, accessibility, consistency and completeness vary enormously. much of this content is fragmented and difficult to locate, and often it is not openly licensed to enable wide dissemination and reuse. Grassroots knowledge may be particularly hard to find, or may not be available online, and the data and information available is often not presented in ways that are accessible to grassroots communities, media and organisations. Bringing this information together in one place, actively addressing gaps in the available information, and providing a range of ways for the information to be accessed and shared will increase the use and usefulness of the available information.
- In 2014, the Land Portal brand was registered as an independent not-for-profit foundation in the Netherlands. The foundation has developed a completely new strategy for the next three years. The goal of the Portal is to become the leading online destination for information, resources, innovation and networking on land issues. Through this it will support more inclusive and informed debate and action on land governance and will increase adoption and up-scaling of best practices and emerging innovation on land tenure.
- Landportal.info has different landing points: The Land Book provides country and thematic pages with linked open data on land governance from diverse sources around the world; the Land Library provides semanticyally enriched content that makes more discoverable and enables the exploration of connections between content; the Land Debate Institute is a forum for discussion, the sharing of experiences and the co-creation of new thinking practice; and finally, we aim to establish g an open access, peer-reviewed journal aimed at encouraging detailed research and understanding of land issues. I want to highlight that the Land Portal is a partnership The Land Portal seeks to collaborate with providers of information services and with organisations and networks interested either in land policy issues in general or specific land-related topics such as the rights of indigenous peoples or of family farmers or networks interested in gender and land access or rangelands issues. The Portal is committed to creating a successful multi-stakeholder platform based partnership and promoting transparentparticipation in land governance through open development, using open source, open data and open content, with local ownership, encouragingengagement with partner organizations from the south. Slide of the localization strategy
- Our localization strategy aims at expand the range of content made available through the land Portal by creating an information eco-system. The Portal has evolved from being a centralized supply driven aggregator of information sources - collecting and disseminating information - to becoming a demand driven professional information service provider seeking to ensure that that local perspectives on land rights and land use, often poorly reflected in large official data-sets, are better incorporated. Rather than pursuing this goal through a centralised, stand-alone strategy, the Portal has chosen a distributed model, working in partnership with local organisations. We aim to global access to information on land while simultaneously helping local organisations to improve the accessibility and use of information about land at national and local levels. The Portal is taking the next steps to collaborate with local organizations to develop their capacity to contribute to and make use of this emerging international data environment. In the process it can widen the range of voices present in global land debates.
- Land Portal has established a partnership agreement with EWMI-Open Development Initiative to work together on land use and tenure issues with the objective of i) Improving Community Participation in Land Governance in the Mekong region ii) Providing tools and information to facilitate innovations in Land Administration and Management Systems in the Mekong Region This work will include collecting and making information available to the public in a compelling way, and contributing to: Responsible land governance and corporate social responsibility strategies; Responsible land investments for local benefit and common resource management; Community land use planning and participation in identification of areas for state land acquisition/recovery; Land documentation for community land titling and social enfranchisement. Building capacity for paraprofessionals (paralegals and para-surveyors) to assist family farmers secure land rights; Assisting in mapping land claims of family farmers and indigenous communities. What this collaboration will look like: • Harmonizing taxonomy with the FAO AGROVOC thesaurus and translating all terms into local languages; • Significantly improving interoperability and maximizing use of linked data; • Increase efficiency of data sharing with automated technical solutions; • Sharing and curating data and information to make it easily discoverable and reusable; • Develop learning material and data to illustrate major land related trends in the region and in specific countries; • facilitate partnership for information exchange and stimulate dialogue among partners; • Enable reuse of information and data; • Introduce standards that make data more reliable and credible. THESE ARE THE FOUNDAMENTALS TO BUILD A SHARED INFORMATION ECOSYSTEM
- Our aim is to tranform the Land Portal into a distributed network.k We are well on our way towards this path, having evolved from an entirely centralzed platform. We have every hope that thestrategy we have built will serve as a important tool for anyone engaged in land issues, from researchers and international organizations to civil society and governments to achieve greater transparency and ultimately contribute to creating an environment where justice on these issues can prevail.