Australian Landscape Architecture Foundation · open metadata standard · v1.0.0 draft

Open landscape data standard

A community-governed, free metadata standard for Australian landscape projects — plants, site context, sustainability, and Connection to Country — that any BIM, CAD, or GIS tool can read.

Founding supporters wanted

We're inviting practices, universities, councils, and Traditional Owner organisations to shape v1 of the standard. Joining doesn't affect your independence, and there's no cost to begin.

We'll only use your email to contact you about the Foundation standard — no marketing, no sharing.

How it works

  1. Independent organisations (practices, universities, councils) keep full control of operations.
  2. The open standard provides shared JSON fields any BIM, CAD, or GIS tool can read.
  3. Validators check exports; qualifying projects earn a Foundation Approved badge.
  4. Commercial tools (e.g. The Landscape Archive) implement the standard and may sell BIM assets on top.

Schema modules

Selling plants & families

The open standard is open and free. Landscape Archive and other vendors can still sell Revit families, shop packs, and Library subscriptions — commerce sits in the implementation layer, not in the public vocabulary.

Independent stewardship

This portal is hosted separately from landscapearchive.com.au, so the community standard stays neutral while commercial products evolve. The Foundation holds the open schema; vendors compete on implementation quality.

Open source & licence

The v1 schema, validator, and documentation are published under permissive open licences so any practice, council, or software vendor can adopt them without lock-in:

Landscape Archive application code, connectors, and canonical species datasets remain under separate commercial terms. The Foundation standard is explicitly carved out from commercial IP.

How the standard is governed

The Foundation is a not-for-profit steward of the open standard — not a software vendor. The draft charter encodes four mechanisms:

  1. Written charter — the constitution every supporter signs.
  2. Two-tier power split — explicit reserved powers; anything unlisted stays with members.
  3. Council & voting — representatives vote; super-majority for schema 2.0 and charter changes.
  4. Independent arbitrator — neutral, binding dispute resolution over the charter.

It starts as an unincorporated working group — no new company — stepping up to an incorporated association only later, and only if it needs to hold assets or take grants.

Downloads

v1 JSON field names retain a legacy federation prefix for compatibility; Foundation branding applies to governance and public documentation.