LADM patterns to support the efficient modelling of Cooperative (Community and Strata) Titles for Land Registers

In many jurisdictions sub-ownership rights can be separated from the main body of ownership. In Scotland these are referred to as separate tenements and encompass such ownership rights as minerals, salmon fishing, mines of gold and silver, and petroleum (Reid et al., 1996, pp. 168-171). The main body of ownership may be further encumbered with ancillary rights (such as access) to ensure that holders of sub-ownership rights can effectively enjoy the right they hold. However, these further encumbrances are, in general, not seen as excessively onerous by owners of the main body of ownership. Separated ownership rights, as thus described, have been successfully used in a number of jurisdictions for centuries. Strata (airspace subdivided by reference to structures built in that air) is another form of separated ownership used to define flats in a flatted (shared) building. Ownership within shared buildings requires the division of a building into individually owned property (strata (airspace)) and collectively owned (shared) common property, governed by a set of rules. Owners of flats have interdependent community cooperative rights relationships with other members of the flatted building. These relationships are significantly more complex and onerous than rights required to support other separate tenements (as described above). Similar ownership relationships can be modelled where there is no flatted building, but there are facilities, for example common landscaped areas, that are shared between owners. Hence, a distinction can be made between vertical and horizontal subdivision. The term 'strata title' can be used for vertical subdivisions representing apartment buildings. The term 'community title' can be used for horizontal subdivisions representing planned communities (Sherry, 2016, p. 4). In this paper we refer collectively to horizontal and vertical ownership as cooperative ownership. While 'cooperative ownership' can represent different forms of ownership types