Browsing by Author "Obonyo, Esther"

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    Agent-based modelling of urban sanitation: informal settlements in Nairobi
    (2006) Obonyo, Esther; Omenya, Alfred
    During the last two decades, Nairobi in Kenya has experienced a rapid increase in its urban population. With the number of houses failing to match the increase in urban population, a number of informal settlements (slums) have mushroomed. As the population of these areas continues to increase, the inability of the local authorities to provide basic sanitation services for the urban dwellers is becoming a serious problem. The unprocessed soil water being discarded into the environment is not only adversely affecting the ecosystem; it is also creating unhygienic conditions that are conducive for the transmission of diseases in the densely populated informal settlements. A number of community-based organisations (CBOs) have undertaken various initiatives to mitigate against such problems. These organizations operate largely independently and there is no evidence of an evaluation being undertaken across the board to model the social, economical and environmental impact of the existing sanitation initiatives. This paper describes a proposed agent-based model that is aimed at doing just that. The proposed system will increase the comparative efficacy in the selected domain by modeling the values and incentives for the different organisations in various scenarios.
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    Semantic markup of information on sanitation initiatives in informal settlements
    (2006) Obonyo, Esther; Omenya, Alfred
    The fundamental problem with the ‘traditional’ Web is: information is designed for human consumption and even with the evolution of powerful search engines, information filtering still remains a task that requires significant human involvement. Consequently, any application that is designed to use Web-enabled technologies will eventually encounter problems related to ‘information overload’ and ‘digital anarchy’ (the latter problem emanates from lack of interoperability across systems especially in different organisations). This paper describes a conceptual framework that addresses these issues using emerging Semantic Web Technologies. The framework will focus on demonstrating the potential benefits of using semantic markups and ontologies to augment Web content for Sanitation initiatives in informal settlements using the experience in Nairobi as a test case. It will address problems arising from the sheer scale and diversity of data on sustainable sanitation practice through the use of the Semantic Web technologies. The conceptual framework presented in this paper will be further defined through an iteration of workshops with the stakeholders and expanded into a platform for semantically matching a controlled taxonomy for Sustainable Sanitation for informal settlements.