Analysis and expert assessment of the semantic similarity between land cover classes

Abstract

Products of CORINE Land Cover (CLC), the National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD), the FAO/UNEP Land Cover Classification System (LCCS), etc. currently provide an important source of information used for the assessment of issues such as landscape change, landscape fragmentation and the planning of urbanization. Assuming that the data from these various databases are often used in searching for solutions to environmental problems, it is necessary to know which classes of different databases exist and to what extent they are similar, i.e. their possible compatibility and interchangeability. An expert assessment of the similarity between the CLC and NLCD 1992 nomenclatures is presented. Such a similarity assessment in comparison with the ‘geometric model’, the ‘feature model’ and the ‘network model’ is not frequently used. The results obtained show the similarity of assessments completed by four experts who marked the degree of similarity between the compared land cover classes by 1 (almost similar classes), 0.5 (partially similar classes) and 0 (not similar classes). Four experts agreed on assigning 1 in only three cases; 0.5 was given 33 times. A single expert assigned 0.5 a total of 17 times. Results confirmed that the CLC and NLCD nomenclatures are not very similar.