Modeling indigenous tribes’ land rights with ISO 19152 LADM: A case from Brazil

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 people 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 issues, 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 been extended to include Brazilian land administration experts. This paper aims to define the indigenous land rights in Brazil, as described under various laws, in the framework of ISO 19152 Land Administration Domain Model, with an emphasis on the spatial dimensions of the definitions. The existing international convention on indigenous rights, by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) of 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 packages. 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 contextualized Use Case Diagram is displayed (not currently part of the LADM standard). Finally, 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 to broadened 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 modeling of other types of spatial units and related rights, until a complete, multipurpose, country profile LADM_BR is reached that can underpin an integrated cadastre. It can be equally used to test implementation prototypes, using current or experimental geographic information technologies and spatial databases.