Modelling Brazilian Indigenous Tribes Land Rights with ISO 19152 LADM

SUMMARY The issue of indigenous land rights is a particularly pressing political and socio-economical issue in contemporaneous Brazil. Violent land disputes between non-indigenous land ownership and indigenous with overlapping claims to land rights is a complex problem. It has been caused by the bureaucratic and slow process of land adjudication that generates insecure property rights leading to the violent land disputes. Another problematic issue on indigenous land is the deforestation process. Motivated by such pressing framework, and using the experience and results obtained in a previous paper on indigenous forest rights in India, where a recent Act of law defined the situation, the initial team of authors has grown to include Brazilian land administration experts. This paper aims to define the indigenous land rights in Brazil, as described under various laws having the same legal power, under the framework of ISO 19152 Land Administration Domain Model, with an emphasis on the spatial dimensions of the definitions. The existing international legislation on indigenous land rights, by ILO and the United Nations, is referred as a basis for the national legislation enacted in Brazil. This background review of existing international and national legislation framework supported the following step of establishing the legal sources and definitions for a number of core LADM classes, concerning the Parties, Legal & Administrative and Spatial Units components. The descriptive text is then complemented with UML diagrams. This is a fundamental step in defining an LADM specialized model for the situation of indigenous land rights in Brazil. From this first description, a context Use Case (not currently part of the LADM standard) is displayed. Finally, some conclusions and recommendation regarding future research are presented. It is expected that the publication of the situation of indigenous land rights by using the LADM framework, as presented here for Brazil, and previously for India, can contribute for enlarged discussions by land administration experts worldwide. This is one of the first initiatives (for Brazil) in the use of a specialized model, and in the future can be expanded in order to achieve the modelling of other types of spatial units and related rights, until an multipurpose LADM_BR is reached. It can be equally used to test implementation prototypes, using current or experimental geographic information technologies and spatial databases.