OPDA Knowledge base
Concept tier agent

Proprietor

opda:Proprietor

Proprietor

A Proprietor is the legal owner of a Property as named in a Registered Title. Proprietor is a Role: it is borne by a Person (or, under a named specialisation, by an Organisation) and gets its identity from that bearer.

Why it matters

Proprietorship is the registry’s authoritative record of legal ownership — it is the who owns this answer to which mortgages, charges, and rights attach. OPDA models Proprietor as a Role (not a separate party Kind) precisely because the Proprietor is not a different individual from the Person they are — the Person plays the role of Proprietor on a specific Title.

If you are a conveyancer or registrar working with proprietorship records, this is the entity that lets you attach role-specific properties (capacity, evidenced authority, ownership-share metadata) without forking the underlying Person record.

Hard cases

  • A Person who is Proprietor on two Titles. Two Proprietor Role instances on one Person — different Titles, different role-specific properties.
  • Two Proprietors on one Title. Two Proprietor Role instances bound to the same Title via a single Proprietorship Relator. The joint-vs-tenants-in-common discriminator lives on the Proprietorship, not on the Proprietors.
  • Proprietor keyed in error. A downstream system invents proprietor_id independent of the Person. The IC says: this is wrong. A Proprietor has no identity qua Proprietor; identity is the Person’s.

Identity Criterion

A Proprietor Role-instance is identified by its (Proprietorship, bearer) tuple — the Proprietorship binding plus the Person (or Organisation) bearing the role. The Role NEVER supplies its own identity. See the Logical tier → for the typed structure.

  • Role — Proprietor is the canonical OPDA Role
  • Person — the typical bearer of a Proprietor role
  • Organisation — the alternative bearer (under a named specialisation)
  • Proprietorship — the Relator binding Proprietors to a Registered Title
  • Registered Title — the registry-side context for a Proprietorship
%%{init: {"theme": "base"}}%% flowchart LR accTitle: Proprietor related-Kinds neighbourhood graph accDescr: Proprietor as a Role borne by a Person (or, under a specialisation, by an Organisation), bound to a Registered Title via the Proprietorship Relator. classDef centre fill:#E1BEE7,stroke:#6A1B9A,stroke-width:3px,color:#4A148C classDef cls fill:#B3E5FC,stroke:#0277BD,stroke-width:2px,color:#01579B classDef ext fill:#ECEFF1,stroke:#455A64,stroke-width:2px,color:#263238 Proprietor["Proprietor
(Role)"]:::centre Person["Person"]:::cls Organisation["Organisation
(specialisation)"]:::cls Proprietorship["Proprietorship
(Relator)"]:::cls Title["RegisteredTitle"]:::cls Role["Role
(pattern)"]:::ext Proprietor -->|"borneBy"| Person Proprietor -.->|"specialised borneBy"| Organisation Proprietorship -->|"bears"| Proprietor Proprietorship -->|"binds"| Title Proprietor -.->|"specialises"| Role

Source ODR

ODR-0006 — Agents and roles §Q2

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