A shared vocabulary for the profession
Landscape architecture is spread across studios, universities, councils, and agencies that each name the same things differently. An open data dictionary is the quiet infrastructure that lets them speak — and disagree — precisely.
When records cannot be joined: a vocabulary problem
A landscape project passes through many hands — the practice that designs it, the nursery that supplies it, the council that approves it, the university that studies it, the agency that maintains it. Each keeps records. Almost none of them use the same words for the same things. One file says “native grass mix,” another “indigenous groundcover,” a third a botanical name that was superseded a decade ago. The information exists; it simply cannot be joined, compared, or checked.
The gap is vocabulary, not technology. Before a profession can share data honestly, it has to agree on what its terms mean — to make difference legible without flattening it. The Landscape Archive Foundation exists to steward that agreement: an open, citable dictionary of the fields a landscape record ought to carry, and precise definitions for each.
A dictionary you can cite, not just read
TLA-185 is that dictionary. It describes 185 documented elements — taxonomy and identity, site context, climate screening, sustainability disclosure, cultural protocol, and BIM delivery — as structural definitions, not as a dataset. Anyone may read it, reference it, and build on it under an open licence.
What makes a dictionary infrastructure rather than a glossary is that each term is citable. Every element now has a permanent identifier and a published definition, so a university can cite it in a curriculum, an agency can reference it in procurement, and a practice can point to it in a specification — and all three are pointing at exactly the same thing, at a fixed version, independent of any single vendor’s product lifecycle.
Definitions should be argued about
A living vocabulary is one that is debated. What counts as “native” for a given project? When does a screening estimate become a claim? Which synonym is preferred, and which is merely tolerated? These are professional questions, and they deserve a published governance process — open proposals, request for comment, and versioned release.
So each term carries a way to propose a change. A practitioner who thinks a definition is wrong, incomplete, or out of date can open a proposal against that exact term; published review routes it into a request for comment and, if adopted, a versioned release. The words move forward in the open, with a record of who argued what and why — the same standard of truth-telling the Foundation asks of the projects that use them.
Why an independent steward
A vocabulary stewarded by an independent Foundation can be cited, taught, and revised through open governance. The Foundation layer is deliberately carved out from the commercial stack so the “grammar” of landscape metadata remains under open, independent stewardship. Vendors — including The Landscape Archive — compete on how well they implement the standard.
That independence is what lets institutions adopt the dictionary with confidence. It is also what makes advocacy possible: a shared, open reference is something a profession can take to government, to standards bodies, and to the academy and say, together, “this is how we describe our work, and here is where you can check it.”
Next Steps
Open Foundation materials for one studio deliverable are on the adoption guide. A short Archive page for practices is also available.