1. The World Bank Land and Poverty Conference is glad to welcome poster session presenters. You have been selected by the land conference team to present your poster to an interested audience at the conference.
The posters will be on display at the Atrium of the World Bank main building on the whole Tuesday March 21 and Wednesday March 22.
There will also be a prize awarded by the conference organizers to the best rated poster.
Please view the instructions on the conference website on how to upload poster in your Conftool account. The deadline for submitting your poster is 11:59 PM on February 22, 2017 (Eastern Standard Time).
The size requirements for posters are as follows:
Size A1 vertical: 841 x 594 mm (height x width) or 33.1 x 23.4 inches (height x width)
Please consult the following formatting template below when preparing your poster.

2. Land Portal Foundation
 The Use of Standard Vocabularies in the Land Sector 
Land Portal Foundation
Introduction
Open data is rapidly becoming a principle that an increasing number of governments and organizations embrace. Open data is an immensely powerful and indispensable tool in moving towards an evidence-based approach to land governance. 
However, open data is more than just ‘simply’ publishing your data with an open license. With the immense amounts of data that are being published on the web, there is a very real risk of not being able to distinguish the different pieces of knowledge that are relevant to users among a massive number of datasets.
One element of such a standardized approach is the use of controlled vocabularies to classify data and information. Employing standards to classify knowledge makes information discoverable and enables applications to more easily ‘consume’ and ‘exchange’ metadata from and between multiple catalogs. 
With a topic such as land governance, which plays a role on both a global and very local level, in various different sectors, across all continents and in all languages, it is a great challenge to universally define the issues that come with insecurity of tenure. However, doing so will enhance the discoverability of the data immensely and therefore increase its impact. 
Results
The main conclusion about standards within the land governance community is that there is no structured or uniform approach to them. We saw a range of sophistication in the way to classify the materials organizations publish, ranging from no classification at all, to a standard set of keywords that could be used.
Roughly, five types of classification can be identified. The first being no classification at all for content or merely categorizing content by resource type. Secondly, many organizations use a ‘free tagging’-system, allowing users to create new tags as they add new resources, leading to an unstructured list of thousands of keywords that overlap. The third situation is where organizations have a pre-selected set of keywords that can be used to classify content, but there is no real structure to these keyword lists. For example, organizations do not differentiate between resource type, geographical keywords or topical keywords within these. Similarly, some organizations do have a standard set of keywords or topics, but the list is only applicable to their own organizations and not meant to be re-used or accepted by other organizations. There were examples of organizations that structured their publications under their own strategic commitments.
Finally, there have been attempts to standardize a set of topical keywords – a glossary - within the land sector and to gain general acceptance of the entire sector to these initiatives, such as Focus on Land in Africa and more recently, the Global Land Indicator Initiative. However, these glossaries are stand-alone lists in HTML or PDF format, but not used or applied in any way. Focus on Land in Africa does not use their own glossary to classify their content – it is meant to merely guide users through the documents they can read on the website and to create an understanding behind the meaning of the different keywords. The Global Land Indicator Initiative has created a glossary with key land-related terms, which has been a collaborative process by several prominent organizations working on land. However, this list has not published yet, nor are there any concrete plans to use this glossary other than as a reference for generally accepted and determined key concepts and definitions for land governance issues.
The several modes for classifying information within among land-related organizations that were identified during the scoping research that led to the conclusion that there is a very limited awareness about standards to classify data within the land sector. Some organizations do not use topical keywords at all and those that do have not designed these lists to be seen or used by other organizations. Therefore, there is a clear gap in the use of standards for the land sector and in the existence of standards for the land sector specifically.
Materials and methods
The Land Portal studied websites of a sample of organizations, representing the diversity of organizations publishing information on land. This sample varied from the bigger global organizations and networks, as well as very local organizations working on land governance issues. There are organizations that also touch work related to the land sector within their wider focus, such as FAO or the World Bank, that make use of standards that are broader than just land-related keywords. Those standards have been left out of this assessment, to limit the scope to standards related to land specifically.
Conclusions
The Land Portal Foundation has responded to this gap and is developing a new topical standard for the land sector only: LandVoc. LandVoc consists of land-related keywords derived from existing and generally accepted standard vocabularies for other (related) sectors, such as the agricultural sector (FAO’s Agrovoc).
The Land Portal is not the authoritative organization to further develop this vocabulary, but coordinates the enrichments of LandVoc by the input of more translations, missing key terms related to land, synonyms to reflect the local usage of terms describing the same concept by various other organizations. The Land Portal particularly requests its partners in the global South to review and enrich LandVoc, to respond to the fact that the original list was based on vocabularies that were developed on a global level.
This way, LandVoc will become a useful tool for the whole land sector, both on global, regional and local level. With such a tool, valuable information on best practices and lessons learned on land governance are more discoverable and interoperable, increasing the impact of the knowledge immensely.
Acknowledgements
Carlos Tejo Alonso, Valeria Pesce & the GODAN Action Consortium .
Literature cited
Gap Analysis Report, Land Portal Foundation, October 2016. .