Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) of Kenya

With an estimated 50% of global land held, used, or otherwise managed by communities, interfacing indigenous, customary, and informal land tenure systems with official land administration systems is critical to achieving universal land tenure security at a global scale. The complexity and organic nature of these tenure systems, however, makes their modelling and documentation within standard, generic land administration systems extremely difficult. This paper presents a model that loosely integrates a Local Domain Model (LDM) developed for a Maasai community in Kenya with the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM). The LDM is an ontological schema which captures local knowledge in a systematic, formal way that is directly or indirectly relevant to land administration. The integration with LADM is achieved through an ontological schema called the Adaptor Model.

For the majority of the LADM implementations, land administration legislation is interpreted through LADM concepts, harmonizing already registered or registerable land information. Through these implementations, LADM follows a top-down approach, as followed by the traditional land administration systems of western countries. Latest trends in land administration encourage public participation in an attempt to cope with a series of land administration issues (high cost of land registration, land-related conflicts, social unrest due to land use transformations or corruption (Williamson, 2001)). This is not entirely new. Already, since 1998, through the 99 published Indigenous Knowledge (IK) Notes, the World Bank openly recognised the power of local participation in community problem solving.