ITACaRT: An Equal-Area Parallelogram Discrete Global Grid System for Terrestrial Cadastral Mapping—Designed for Usability and Blockchain Integration

Typically, the modernization of Land Administration Systems (LAS) concentrates on overarching aspects and seldom investigates the spatial infrastructure that underpins it, thereby presenting challenges for the integration of geospatial data. For this purpose, Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS), characterized by its "congruent cartography", offer a promising solution within a multi-scale reference framework. Moreover, a significant gap exists in the absence of a DGGS designed to address the cartographic focus and usability requirements for land administration, such as equal-area sizing and geodetic precision. Developed at the Aeronautics Institute of Technology (ITA), the ITA Cadastral Ellipsoidal Reference Tessellation (ITACaRT) was introduced as an innovative DGGS to bridge this gap. The development of ITACaRT was guided by several key criteria, including its suitability for cadastral purposes at appropriate scales, compatibility with the WGS84 ellipsoid and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), utilization of simple parallelogram-shaped equal-area cells, a direct tessellation adhering to Cartesian geometry for usability by geoinformation professionals, and decimal convergence to facilitate blockchain tokenization. Complementary to these criteria, a Compositional Hierarchical Indexing system was devised to represent cadastral vector features more efficiently than the atomic identifiers typical of conventional DGGS. ITACaRT thus establishes a solid foundation for contemporary LAS, providing a viable spatial infrastructure that supports emerging technologies such as blockchain.