Abstract
Companies and governmental agencies are increasingly seeking ways to explore emerging trends and issues that have the potential to shape up their future operational environments. This paper exploits text mining techniques for investigating future signals of the land administration sector. After a careful review of previous literature on the detection of future signals through text mining, we propose the use of topic models to enhance the interpretation of future signals. Findings of the study highlight the large spectrum of issues related to land interests and their recording, as nineteen future signal topics ranging from climate change mitigation and the use of satellite imagery for data collection to flexible standardization and participatory land consolidations are identified. Our analysis also shows that distinguishing weak signals from latent, well-known, and strong signals is challenging when using a predominantly automated process. Overall, this study summarizes the current discourses of the land administration domain and gives an indication of which topics are gaining momentum at present.
Highlights
Providing tools to support land tenure, land value, land use planning, and land development [1], land administration is fundamental for a nation’s economic and social development, e.g., [2]
We show by using text mining tools how to explore, organize, and analyze future signals in the context of land administration
The future signal topics were divided under four categories: latent, weak, well-known but not strong, and strong signals
Summary
Providing tools to support land tenure, land value, land use planning, and land development [1], land administration is fundamental for a nation’s economic and social development, e.g., [2]. The changing people-to-land relationship has led to matching changes in the function of cadastral systems—the core building block of a land administration system [1]—as the historical development of cadastral systems demonstrates [4]. For the cadastral systems to be addressing the right kind of needs in the future as well, it is essential to pay attention to emerging issues and drivers of change [5,6]. Horizon scanning is one way to increase the understanding of future challenges and opportunities. Futurologists often use terms such as weak signals, emerging issues, wild cards, trends, and megatrends in connection with horizon scanning. The methods of horizon scanning have been a matter of debate. Some scholars support the use of participatory methods like interviews, Delphi questionnaires, or workshops, while
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