Proposal for participating in NCGIA Initiative 21 workshop entitled

"Formal Models of Common Sense Geographic Worlds".

a) I am currently working on a project centered around property rights, economic development and comparative legal ontology, funded by the University at Buffalo. The goal of the project is to establish the ontological foundations of a general theory of land, real estate, and property rights, of a sort which will help us to understand and explain the conflicts between legal and geographical ontologies of different cultures. The workshop will provide invaluable assistance for my work on this project. Moreover, I believe I can contribute insights concerning geographic worlds which arise from the peculiar legal-philosophical perspective from which I approach these issues.

b) One of the most important aspects of the project on property rights and economic development is to gather data on the different systems of landed property around the globe. These systems differ considerably: some of them rely not on sophisticated legal and administrative apparata but on naive geographic schemes, and vice-versa. One of the central goals of my research is to provide a general framework for dealing with landed property which would overcome the difficulties in communication that now frequently arise when interaction is sought between legal and economic institutions based on conflicting ontologies. My concern with the body of knowledge that people have about their surroundings thus relates specifically to the way people conceive, divide, and categorize land as well as landed property. My inquiries relate to the topic of cadastral registration, and to the relevance of cross-cultural in cadastral registration to Geographic Information Science.