CRC Press Land Use and Land Cover Semantics: Principles, Best Practices, and Prospects

Explore the Important Role that the Semantics of Land Use and Land Cover Plays within a Broader Environmental Context Focused on the information semantics of land use and land cover (LULC) and providing a platform for reassessing this field, Land Use and Land Cover Semantics: Principles, Best Practices, and Prospects presents a comprehensive overview of fundamental theories and best practices for applying semantics in LULC. Developed by a team of experts bridging relevant areas related to the subject (LULC studies, ontology, semantic uncertainty, information science, and earth observation), this book encourages effective and critical uses of LULC data and considers practical contexts where LULC semantics can play a vital role. The book includes work on conceptual and technological semantic practices, including but not limited to categorization; the definition of criteria for sets and their members; metadata; documentation for data reuse; ontology logic restrictions; reasoning from text sources; and explicit semantic specifications, ontologies, vocabularies, and design patterns. It also includes use cases from applicable semantics in searches, LULC classification, spatial analysis and visualization, issues of Big Data, knowledge infrastructures and their organization, and integration of bottom-up and top-down approaches to collaboration frameworks and interdisciplinary challenges such as EarthCube. This book: Centers on the link between planning goals, objectives, and policy and land use classification systems Uses examples of maps and databases to draw attention to the problems of semantic integration of land use/cover data Discusses the principles used in a categorization Explores the origins and impacts of semantic variation using the example of land cover Examines how crowd science and human perceptions can be used to improve the quality of land cover datasets, and more Land Use and Land Cover Semantics: Principles, Best Practices, and Prospects offers an up-to-date account of land use/land cover semantics, looks into aspects of semantic data modeling, and discusses current approaches, ongoing developments, and future trends. The book provides guidance to anyone working with land use or land cover data, looking to harmonize categories, repurpose data, or otherwise develop or use LULC datasets. Review "The book is a collection of articles written by well-known scientists in Spatial Information Science. The book editors and reviewers led by Dr. Ahlqvist – recognized specialist in the land use and land cover data treatment, provide careful selection and high quality of published material. I find this book to be a timely and helpful resource that gathers many different strands of quality research on increasingly pressing issues around the integrated use of land use and land cover data."―Sergei Levashkin, Visual Intelligence LP, Houston, Texas, USA About the Author Ola Ahlqvist, PhD, is associate professor of geography at The Ohio State University. He worked professionally with local and regional environmental planning in Finland and Sweden in the 1990s. After completing a PhD in geography at Stockholm University in 2001, followed by postdoctoral training at Penn State University, Ahlqvist joined the Geography Department at The Ohio State University in 2005. His research interests include semantic uncertainty and formal ontology in analysis of land cover change; how online maps, social media, and games form a nexus for spatial collaboration; and the scholarship of engagement in geographic information system and service learning. Dalia Varanka, PhD, is research geographer at the U.S. Geological Survey and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University. After working at the Field Museum of Natural History and the Newberry Library in Chicago, she received her PhD degree in geography from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1994. She began her federal career as a physical science te