Towards Smart Sketch Maps for Community-driven Land Tenure Recording Activities

While sketching is widely deemed to be a powerful interface for expressing and recording land tenure information, many significant challenges must be addressed in order to automatically, or semi-automatically, interpret free-hand sketches. We present progress on our system which is being developed to facilitate sketch-based land tenure record creation in community based approaches. Given the community focus taken in this project it was necessary to address such issues as developing an effective visual language for sketching based on a well-defined model of the domain from the communities’ perspectives; providing tools to recognise hand drawn elements of the visual language; deriving appropriate spatial representations based on qualitative spatial relations; and integrating the data from the sketch maps into a base topographic map. The paper outlines the main goal, workflows and components of our system for which we have already created prototype implementations for several of the components.