Rural land management is a challenging task to many developing countries, due to limited financial and technological resources. This is a serious problem too in Ethiopia in general, and in Seharti Samre in particular. Seharti Samre suffers from the lack of advanced techniques that help and support land registration using GIS technology. The currently-used-system for land registration in the Seharti Samre is extremely traditional, takes long processing time and not able to meet the increasing

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... and. Conflicts among data on maps and on ground are frequently faced and decisions relating to these problems cannot easily be made. Such an out of date system leads to difficulties in tracking and updating land owners and identifying the actual current owners. This study was conducted to assess the existing land registration techniques in Seharti Samre and to exploit the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based land registration techniques. Methods included on the one hand the use of PostgreSQL to create a geospatial database that will store land holding details in a database format for textual data; and on the other hand the use of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard's Web Map Service (WMS) for easy registration, management and user friendly interface. A prototype of the system has been developed and tested; and its relevance was validated by users in Seharti Samre. The study showed that with the use GIS technologies, rural land registration can be significantly improved.