Land Use and Land Cover Semantics

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 technician with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Milwaukee. She joined the Mid-Continent Mapping Center, Rolla, Missouri, in 1997 and became a research scientist in 1999. She conducts research in geospatial semantics and ontology and teaches a graduate-level course on that subject. Steffen Fritz, PhD, is a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria. He has a master of science in geographical information for development from the University of Durham, UK, and a PhD from the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, UK. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Joint Research Centre (JRC Ispra) Italy, his main focus was to mosaic, harmonize, and produce the Global Land Cover GLC2000 database, but also studied the uncertainties in global land cover. Since 2007, Dr. Fritz has been at International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA, Austria), where he became the initiator and driving force behind Geo-Wiki.org a global land cover validation tool based on Web 2.0 and crowdsourcing to reduce uncertainties in land cover and land use in particular. Since 2014 he is group leader of the Earth Observation Systems group within the Ecosystem Services and Management Program at IIASA. Krzysztof Janowicz, PhD, is an assistant professor for geographic information science at the Geography Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He is the chair of UCSB’s Cognitive Science Program and one of two editors-in-chief of the Semantic Web journal. Before moving to Santa Barbara, he was an assistant professor at the Pennsylvania State University and a postdoctoral at the University of Muenster, Germany. He is studying the role of space and time for a knowledge organization and is especially interested in geosemantics, geo-ontologies, and geographic information retrieval.

Land Use/Land Cover Classification Systems and Their Relationship to Land Planning. Ontology for National Land Use/Land Cover Map: Poland Case Study. The Need for Awareness of Semantic Plasticity in International Harmonization of Geographical Information: Seen from a Nordic Forest Classification Perspective. Parameterized Approaches to the Categorization of Land Use and Land Cover. Eliciting and Formalizing the Intricate Semantics of Land Use and Land Cover Class Definitions. The EAGLE Concept: A Paradigm Shift in Land Monitoring. An Applied Ontology for Semantics Associated with Surface Water Features. Land Type Categories as a Complement to Land Use and Land Cover Attributes in Landscape Mapping and Monitoring. Text Mining Analysis of Land Cover Semantic Overlap . LC: A Spatial-temporal Data Model to Study Qualified Land Cover Changes. Applying Tegon, the Elementary Physical Land Cover Feature, for Data Interoperability. Resolving Semantic Heterogeneities in Land Use and Land Cover. Crowdsourcing Landscape Perceptions to Validate Land Cover Classifications.