The land governance and the open movement: the Land Portal Foundation
Fecha de la noticia: 24-01-2018
High diplomacy traditionally plays a role in helping cultures and nations to dialogue with each other. But when it comes to strengthening the right to land, it is the local communities themselves that have to get involved.
This is the vision of the Land Portal Foundation, and the main reason to create the web landportal.org, a place where interested groups can gather and consult information about land governance. This information comes from diverse sources (fragmented and sometimes not accessible) and produced by governments, academia, international organizations, indigenous peoples and non-governmental organizations. Appart from gathering information, the platform promotes the generation of debates, the exchange of information and the creation of networks of contacts.
The organization, and therefore the platform, is based on the idea of the "open movement", which are embodied in concrete realities such as establishing by default open source licenses in all its computer developments, the consumption of open data and the publication of linked open data, or the use of open licenses when sharing information.
The portal collects statistical data, bibliographic data, or data on different resources (organizations, events, news, projects) and republishes them as LOD in a machine-readable format (RDF), using a standards-based and shared data model under an open license. With this, the foundation aims to create an information ecosystem and reuse it.
To access this data published under the criteria of the Linked Open Data, a SPARQL endpoint has been deployed where semantic queries can be made to the different graphs in which the knowledge is grouped.
Another project of the organization is LandVoc,, a controlled vocabulary that gathers concepts related to the land governance. This vocabulary comes from the AGROVOC thesaurus, and was born as an attempt to standardize the concepts related to the land governance. In this way the different organizations of the domain can use the concepts to label content and thus favor the information exchange and the integration of systems. LandVoc currently consists of 270 concepts, is available in 4 languages (English, French, Spanish and Portuguese), and is published under the open license Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO).
The Land Portal Foundation carries out all this with the aim of improving the land governance and thus benefit the groups with greater insecurity in their right to land. The theory of change of the organization predicts an increase in the quality of life of the most vulnerable groups, if their right to live and cultivate without fear of forced or illegal evictions is achieved; and with the security of land tenure, it also predicts progress of the food security for the most vulnerable communities in the world.
