Ontologies for the Real Property Domain

Real property, also known as real estate, realty or immovable property, is one of the most important assets for the world economy. Real property data is valuable input for decision makers in various domains. Real property data has temporal and spatial characteristics and is distributed across multiple systems. Integration of real property data from legal and business systems (possibly from different countries) with contextual data in related domains is a challenging task that requires cross-domain knowledge. Real property ontologies, capturing relevant domain knowledge in a structured way, are essential in the process of integrating real property data. This paper identifies key aspects of the real property domain from a data integration perspective, and surveys ontologies for real property and its related domains. It analyzes geospatial standards for representing geospatial concepts and attributes relevant to real properties, the Land Administration Domain Model and its implementations, and ontologies for real property transactions and for real property data integration. This survey aims to collect and compare existing real property ontologies and conceptual models, serving as a reference point for ontologies and conceptual models in the real property domain.