Thesis Defense: Land Parcel Identification System conceptual model: development of geoinfo community conceptual model

Abstract

This dissertation presents the development of the Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS) Conceptual Model (LCM) for the administration and control of agricultural subsidies of the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

The subsidies which European farmers receive in the frame of the CAP are administered through the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) that are established and run by the EU member states. IACS includes a Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS) as its spatial component. The requirement to map and record land eligible for payments has led to the situation where the agricultural sector has acquired a large amount of geographic data; the geospatial community of data producers, custodians and users has grown during the last decades. The need to assess the quality and consistency of the LPIS towards the EU regulators as well as to ensure systems’ interoperability as it is required for compliance with environmental legislation, call for harmonisation efforts. In the view of this, an LPIS Conceptual Model (LCM) was developed. The objective of the study was to introduce the modeling framework of ISO 19100 series for advance of quality of geospatial data in the LPIS domain and of interoperability with other geospatial domains.

The LCM was generated by means of both (i) methodological approaches of International Standards of ISO 19100 series, further extended by the INSPIRE principles, and (ii) reverse engineering of existing operational LPIS systems. The latter is based on the results of two LPIS surveys covering different national implementations. Business analysis of the relevant EU regulations and the LPIS surveys led to the first-cut LCM (Paper 1). Model’s core classes cover process of land registration for administration of agricultural subsidies, agrienvironmental measures of rural development and environmental restriction. Agricultural and reference parcels of the model build the framework for recording land cover and land use. Further refinement of the model and the quality aspects of the geographical databases are addressed in two studies presented by Paper 3 and Paper 4: the LCM became naturally a part of the LPIS Quality Assurance programme between the European Commission and EU countries. The LCM was used (i) for conformance assessment of national systems and (ii) for implementation of the LPIS Test Bed portal: set of OGC compliant Web services allowing for agricultural data transformation from national data schemas to the common model as well as transferring, checking and storing spatial and non-spatial observations from the quality inspection.

The interoperability with cadastral domain is tested by Paper 2, which is looking for possibilities of the collaboration of two models – the LCM and the Land Administration Domain Model (became ISO19152 LADM). Owner’s rights, restrictions and responsibilities arising from land ownership in the cadastral domain have many similarities, but also differences with agricultural practice. The collaboration model established via newly introduced spatial class, also the semantic similarity of administrative classes of both models were analysed in details. Further studies (Paper 5) include a representation of different European agricultural systems in LPIS and potentials of using LPIS data in the environmental impact assessment of the agricultural policy. Paper 3 proposes different types of land parcel and ways of integration with data from environmental domain viewed in context of the development of agri-environmental indicators (Paper 5).

Developed firstly for the needs of LPIS Quality Assurance Framework of the European Commission, the LCM also became a part of the International Standard ISO19152 – Land Administration Domain Model (Annex H: use case in agriculture) and INSPIRE DS2.8 Land Cover specification (Annex B2: use case in agriculture).

Keywords
Conceptual models, modeling, model conformance testing, data quality, standardisation, Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS), LPIS Conceptual Model (LCM), Agri-environmental indicators