NDF2019

Identifying, contacting and engaging missing shareholders constitutes an enormous challenge for Māori corporations, iwi and hapū across Aotearoa New Zealand. Without accurate data or tools to harmonise existing fragmented or conflicting data sources, issues around land succession, opportunities for economic development, and maintenance of whānau relationships are all negatively impacted. Māori Land Online (MLO) is the key public-facing portal for documenting and managing land succession information. It is, however, a complex system that has serious legacy issues which impact on opportunities to harvest, analyse, and visualise the rich whānau, whenua, and te reo cultural data held by Te Kooti Whenua Māori / Māori Land Court and Toitū te Whenua / Land Information New Zealand. Researchers at Victoria University of Wellington have developed a culturally-tuned semantic web/linked open data (CIDOC-CRM) information architecture as a framework to knit together and explore relevant and accessible data in order to find missing shareholders for Taranaki-based Parininihi ki Waitotara Corporation, Inc (PKW). Funded by the National Science Challenge Science for Technological Innovation this foundational work is grounded in Mātauranga Māori and Māori Data Sovereignty principles, and has faciliated a prototype web app to assist in shareholder disambiguation and a generative model that reveals latent structures in the MLO data as they have changed over time. This work is also a key step towards our goal of building an interoperable data infrastructure capable of unlocking Māori-Crown data for a prosperous economic, cultural, and socially revitalised post-settlement future. Presenters and researchers Rhys Owen and Rere-No-A-Rangi Pope will share the project's work-in-progress on behalf of the other co-authors Sydney Shep, Marcus Frean and Valerie Chan.