Associating External Land Use/Cover Information with LADM’s Spatial Unit

Abstract

In the LADM design, any specification is not presented on the association of land use/cover information with LADM classes but for the defined association relations between LA_SpatialUnit class and external land use/cover classes. There are many severe obstacles against defining such specifications which are applicable to all cases. In this context, there are many different types of land use/cover classification systems for different purposes in different data quality and content which is either designed internationally or nationally. CORINE land cover, INSPIRE land use/cover themes, land use capability classification and LPIS are a few international examples. In this study, based on natural spatial relation between land use/cover types in an external data source and spatial units of land (land parcels) in a Land Administration System, management of land use/cover data in association with land parcels (spatial units in LADM) was studied in a pilot study area in Turkey. In this context, association of information as attribute data to land parcels and also as subdivision of land parcels (sub-parcels) were studied. Land use/cover data used in this study was specifically produced for this study with an LPIS like digitization method because of unavailability of similar external data sources. Before the processing of the data, both data sets are checked and properly corrected against topological errors. For the association of land use/cover data as attribute information a basic overlay operation without any cluster or XY tolerances was carried out. Attribute table of the product of this operation was used as associated land use/cover data of land parcels, and geographic data produced with this operation was used for the analysis of data consistency and accordingly errors. For the association of land use/cover data as spatial subdivision of land parcels, a special overlay operation with predefined XY tolerances was carried out. Data consistency between the produced data set and land parcels and also errors was analysed by comparing the two method. Together with these data processing and analysis work, LADM modelling abstraction, availability and data quality issues of external land use/cover data, updating and maintenance issues were also discussed accordingly.