The Maasai of Southern Kenya Domain Model of Land Use

Abstract

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> We present a domain model that formalises the human-land relations in the Maasai nomadic pastoralist society in Kenya, referred to as MSKDM, and its integration with the prominent Land Administration Domain Model (LADM). Our long-term aim is to facilitate a land administration system that can accurately capture and express salient Maasai concepts of land use, ownership, communal tenure, and to assist in transparency during land transactions. We use an extensive corpus of existing research literature, and input from our own on-site workshops, as source material for our domain model. We use real sketch maps drawn by Maasai community members that we collected during our field studies for validation, and to demonstrate how our model can be operationalised.</p>

SmartSkeMa: Scalable Documentation for Community and Customary Land Tenure

“…From the corner vertices and the ink extracting the connections between the vertices to form topological structures called a doubly connected edge list (DCEL) [25] (pp. [29][30][31][32][33]. The final polygons are obtained from this DCEL structure.…”

“…The relationship between child and parent nodes in the tree is that the child node is a subconcept of the parent. Figure 7 shows the top two levels of the concept tree of a local domain model used during one of our studies called the MSKDM [32]. The domain model has high level classes Activity, SocialUnit, Livestock, and EnvironmentalCharacteristic.…”

“…The significance of having geographic regions modelled as EnvironmentalCharacteristic is that in this particular domain the most significant aspect of tenure is not the specific geographic location but rather its ecological properties. More examples based on the MSKDM are presented in Karamesouti et al [32] and Chipofya et al [16]. [32].…”

“…More examples based on the MSKDM are presented in Karamesouti et al [32] and Chipofya et al [16]. [32]. The top concept is called Thing and is a super-concept of all other concepts in the model.…”

Innovative Geospatial Solutions for Land Tenure Mapping

“…SmartSkeMa supports land tenure in two ways (Chipofya et al, 2017). First, it documents land-related concepts in a structured domain model as described by the local owners (Karamesouti et al, 2018). Second, it supports the mapping processes by digitizing, annotating, and georeferencing hand-drawn objects in a sketch map (Schwering et al, 2014).…”