Center for Remote Sensing of Land Surfaces, Bonn, 28-30 September 2006

NEW CONCEPT ON LAND COVER / LAND USE INFORMATION

SYSTEM IN SPAIN. DESIGN AND PRODUCTION

Antonio Arozarena1, Guillermo Villa2, Nuria Valcrcel3, Juan Jos Peces4, Emilio Domenech5
and Ana Porcuna6

National Geographic Institute. Cartographic Production Department. General Ibez Ibero,

3. 28003 Madrid. Spain, aarozarena@fomento.es, gmvilla@fomento.es, nvalcarcel@fomento.es,
jjpeces@fomento.es, edomenech@fomento.es, ign_teledeteccion@fomento.es

ABSTRACT
The Spanish National Geographic Institute as National Reference Centre in Land Cover /
Land Use has as one of its objectives to coordinate the information on land cover /land use in
Spain using for the information transmission the support provided by EIONET.
The information on Land cover/ Land use is a basic infrastructure for the territory knowledge
and the society development involves a good quality public infrastructure, so this information
is going to be promote by the EU and the member states more and more.
With the backgrounds of Corine Land Cover project in Spain that meant a new cooperative
way to work between the national and regional Spanish administrations and INSPIRE, it was
considered to design a new National Land cover/Land use Information System called in Spain
SIOSE project.
The objectives of this project are:
1. Avoid duplicity of data and reduce costs of Geographic Information.
2. Production and quality control model based in cooperation between national and regional
administrations.
3. Satisfy EEAs requirements in future Corine Land Cover versions.
4. Satisfy requirements of Spanish national and regional administrations
5. Satisfy requirements of the Spanish National Geographic Institute
6. Integrate land cover and use databases of all the Spanish national institutions
These objectives will be reached by:
1. The creation of a Spatial Data Interest group (SDIC INSPIRE)
2. The normalization of the land cover/ land use data model (UML)
3. The definition of methodologies harmonised and agreed with all the involved institutions
4. Costs shared by all the involved institutions

1. BACKGROUND
The backgrounds for the creation of the SIOSE project are:
- the Image & Corine Land Cover 2000 project (I&CLC2000), coordinated in Spain by the
Spanish National Geographic Institute and produced with a cooperative model between
national and regional Spanish administrations. There was a National Team in charge of
coordination, quality control and project management and the Regional Teams in charge
of production.
- the INSPIRE principles:
o data should be collected once and maintained at the level where this can be done
most effectively
o it should be possible to combine seamlessly spatial information from different
sources across Europe and share it between many users and applications

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o it should be possible for information collected at one level to be shared between

all the different levels, detailed for detailed investigations, general for strategic
purposes
o geographic information needed for good governance at all levels should be
abundant under conditions that do not refrain its extensive use
and the INSPIRE call for the creation of Spatial Data Interest Communities (SDIC), groups of
users, producers and transformers of spatial information, technical competence, financial
resources and policies, with an interest to better use these resources for spatial data
management and the development and operation of spatial information services.
Taking into account the experience obtained in the realization of I&CLC2000 project , this
INSPIRE principles, and the strong need in Spain for a land cover / land use database with a
bigger scale and with high detail information than CLC2000, was design the SIOSE project
with the same scale and revision intervals for all the territory and with normalized procedures.

2. OBJECTIVES AND TECHNICAL FEATURES

The objectives of SIOSE project in Spain are:
1. Avoid duplicity of data and reduce costs of geographic information.
2. Production and quality model based in cooperation between national and regional
administrations.
3. Satisfy EEAs requirements in future Corine Land Cover versions.
4. Satisfy the Spanish National administrations requirements
5. Satisfy Spanish National Geographic Institute requirements
6. Integrate land cover / land use databases and information of the Spanish National
institutions.
The technical features of the project are:
Nominal Scale: 1:25.000
Minimum polygon: 1- 2 ha 0.5 ha in particular cases.
Periodicity: 5 years
Base information: SPOT5 2,5 m images
Decentralized production (regional governments)
Common Data Model:
- multicriteria (cover + use)
- multiparameter (multiple attributes possible for 1 polygon)
- object oriented (UML description)
- can be extended (for particular needs)

3. SIOSE PROJECT ORGANIZATION

The organization of SIOSE project is based on a decentralised and cooperative production
model taking into account the background of I&CLC2000 project and the INSPIRE principle of
information collected at one level and shared between all the different levels. It is assumed
that the public administrations, as producers and users of the geographic information, must
be involved.

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So for this project the Spanish Public Administration through the Ministries of Public works,
Environment, Agriculture, Housing, Defense, Economy and Education and science, and the
Regional governments of the 19 Autonomous regions are in charge of the design,
management and production of SIOSE.
The coordination, quality control and project management is conducted by the National
Geographic Institute (IGN) attached to the Ministry of Public works (MFOM) with the
collaboration of the Ministry of Environment (MMA), and the production will be done by 19
production teams created with geographical criteria (19 regional administrations).
There are also 6 technical groups created with sectorial criteria composed by experts in
different matters such as satellite images, agriculture, forest, urban, GIS and methodology
and data dissemination in charge principally of the design of the SIOSE conceptual data
model, the metadata (ISO19115) and the establishment of the methodological processes.
Also a National Technical Team with 11 members has been created representing all the
institutions involved which will take care that all the European and national requirements in
land cover-land use will be satisfied and the approval of the technical documents generated
in the project.

Project management
National Technical Team
(NRC Land cover)
(11 members)
IGN- MFOM / MMA

Thematic working groups Regional coordinator (19)

Thematic criteria
1. Urban
2. Agriculture
Production teams (19)
3. Forestry
Geographic criteria
4. GIS and methodology
5. Satellite images
Decentralised and cooperative
6. Data dissemination production

Data model (UML)

Process methodology
Metadata (ISO19115)

Land cover / use Interest Communities

Figure 1: SIOSE project organisation

The technological changes contribute to implement new ways of production and sharing of
information, so there would be new strategies to satisfy user requirements without increment
of cost.
The cooperation between all levels of administration (global, national, regional, local) is,
therefore, very important to optimize cost/benefit ratio.
The funding of SIOSE project is shared between Spanish national administrations (66%):
Spanish National Geographic Institute

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Spanish Environmental Ministry

Spanish Agriculture Ministry
Spanish Housing Ministry
Spanish Economy and Treasury Ministry
Spanish Education and Science Ministry
and 19 Spanish regional administrations (34%).

4. SIOSE PROJECT EXECUTION

The execution of SIOSE project in Spain is based in two basic principles:
o The use of a normalised data model, reached by a consensus between the national
and regional administrations
o The harmonisation of other Spanish databases in the geometry and the thematic, also
reached by a consensus between the institutions in charge of these databases.

4.a. The SIOSE data model

The design of the data model was made taking into account:
It must satisfy requirements of the participating organisms in SIOSE
It must consider all the necessary land cover / use data minimizing redundancies.
The data must be organize so that different users can access data in a view according
to their needs
Provide a flexible version of the SIOSE Conceptual Data Model, able of being extended
in the future.

4.a.i. Hierarchical Classification Concept

The hierarchical classification conceptual model used in Corine, Murbandy and other land
use/land cover databases has shown important limitations. Using Object Oriented Data Model
(OODM) technology it is possible to overcome these limitations and obtain more useful and
coherent databases. The conceptual model for the proposed OODM is presented using
Universal Modelling Language (UML).
All the nomenclatures mentioned above are based on the concept of hierarchical
classification which is based on the following principles:
1. The working area is divided in a set of polygons, each enclosing a theoretically uniform
area.
2. Each polygon is assigned to one, and only one, thematic class of the Nomenclature.
3. Each Thematic class is a different category of lu/lc.
4. Thematic classes are organized hierarchically: one 1st level class is divided in several
2nd level classes, and so on.
5. Each class is defined in the Nomenclature description text.
6. Many class definitions include threshold values for different parameters, in order to
decide if a polygon belongs to a particular class.
E.g.: Residential structures cover more than 80% of the total surface. More than 50% of
the buildings have three or more stories
7. In the alphanumerical database, each polygon is associated to one registry with only one
field that contains the class label. E.g.: 1.1.2.4

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4.a.ii. Minimum Mapping Unit (MMU) concept

In order to obtain a usable database, and also to limit the production budget, it is obliged to
define a MMU, as the minimum surface permitted for any polygon.
This forces the photo interpreter, in many cases, to draw polygons that contain areas with
different lu/lc.
In spite of this, he must assign to the polygon one, and only one, class of the Nomenclature
(the dominant class among those present in the polygon: normally the class that occupies
the greatest percentage of the polygons surface).

4.a.iii. Problems and shortcomings experienced in the production and use of

hierarchical classification databases
Experience since 1987 in the production and use of CLC90, CLC2000, Murbandy and other
land cover / land use databases, has shown several shortcomings and limitations of the o.k.
concept:
1. Proliferation of unnecessary threshold subclasses, due to differences introduced by
values adopted by a particular parameter.
E.g.: Residential continuous dense urban fabric / Residential continuous medium
dense urban fabric,
2. Proliferation of unnecessary mixed classes, due to the need to address some of the
situations in which a polygon contains several land cover / land use types.
E.g.: Complex cultivation patterns, Mixed forest,
3. Mixed classes provide little information to user
E.g.: Complex cultivation patterns,
4. Mixed classes make the database somewhat incoherent to the hierarchical principle,
as they are classes that contain other classes of the same level.
E.g.: Mixed forest contains broad-leaved forest + coniferous forest
5. Mixed classes can easily lead to erroneous conclusions in the use of the database.
E.g.: If one wants to know how many vineyards there are in a certain region, he will
search for the class 2.2.1: Vineyards. But there can also be plenty of vineyards
hidden in other classes as: 2.2.3: Olive groves (which includes the association of
olives trees and vines); 2.4.2: Complex cultivation patterns, etc
6. Many class definitions are very complex. This makes these classes difficult to assign by
the photo interpreter and, what is worse, difficult to understand by non-expert users. In
order to understand what means that polygons are assigned to each particular class, it
is necessary to have access to, understand and keep in mind all the time, the definitions
and interpretation keys of the Nomenclature.
E.g.: 1.1.2. Discontinuous urban fabric: Most of the land is covered by structures.
Buildings, roads and artificially surface areas are associated with vegetated areas and
bare soil, which occupy discontinuous but significant surfaces. Between 10% and 80%
of the land is covered by residential structures."
7. Information stored in the database is much less than information acquired by the photo
interpreter.
E.g.: In a forest polygon, the photo interpreter evaluates the trees surface as 85 %. But
the user only receives the information that trees are more than 30 %

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8. Subtle but important variations in certain parameters values (such as % of buildings, or

trees,) cannot be stored in the information system: if these variations do not cross the
threshold line, he cannot divide a polygon.
E.g.: Urban areas with very different levels of building densities (as 10 % and 50 %)
have to be included in the same class, 1.1.2.2.
9. When there are multiple land cover / land use types in a single polygon (because of the
MMU size limitation) we must assign a single class to this polygon. This introduces
erroneous information in the database and also in the statistics derived from it.
E.g.: Vineyards in Galicia (Spain) have great social, cultural and economic importance,
but they are present always in small parcels, so they are almost never dominant in a
polygon, and almost disappear from CLC database.
10. There are many very important indicators that could be calculated from the values of
the parameters appearing in CLC/Moland class definitions (sometimes crossing them
with exogenous information such as population, etc) like:
- building density (m3/m2)
- m2 of buildings per person
- average height of buildings
- % of impervious surface
- % of trees in a forest
- m2 of green areas per person
- land take by transport infrastructures
- etc
Hierarchical classification databases do not allow calculating these indicators, because
parameter values are not stored in it.
11. Changes in land cover / land use obtained from a hierarchical classification database
are not very significant because a lot of important changes are hidden in polygons
assigned to dominant classes or to mixed classes.
E.g.: We cannot take into account a clear-cut inside a coniferous forest if it is smaller
than 25 ha although the change is greater than 5 ha
12. Complex definitions, in which several parameters thresholds interact, increase the risk
of incoherencies and/or photo interpretation errors.
13. It is almost impossible to compare or make bridges between two hierarchical
classification databases built with different Nomenclatures.
E.g.: When we have a 3.1.1. Broad leaved forest polygon in CLC, there is no way to
know if it should be labelled as forest in a database where forests are defined as
more than 40 % of trees.
14. It is very difficult to add external information to an existent hierarchical classification
database, from a specialized source. E.g.: agricultural, forestry,

4.a.iv. Proposed solutions: Object Oriented Data Model concept

Most of the problems cited above come from the attempt to classify the infinite variety of
landscapes in a limited number of closed classes.
The solution we propose to solve most of these problems is to use an Object Oriented Data
Model, based on these basic principles:
1. Territory must be divided in a set of closed polygons, each containing a surface that is
as homogeneous as possible.

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2. An exception to preceding point is when homogeneous surfaces have an area smaller

than the MMU. This forces us to draw a polygon that encloses several areas,
homogeneous each one, but different between them.
3. Our aim is not to classify polygons but to describe them as well as possible.
4. These descriptions are made associating one or more covers and attributes to each
polygon.
5. Covers are thematic categories (UML classes). They are defined with conceptual
definitions.
6. Covers can be simple or compound (complex). Simple covers are object
categories that cannot be divided into simpler ones. Compound covers are
associations of several simple covers that have their own personality. This makes it
desirable to consider them as a whole, with its name and special attributes. The
percentages of simple covers in one compound cover vary from instance to instance.
E.g.: -Polygon with 1 Compound cover: Urban fabric
-One instance of Urban fabric can be an association of 4 simple covers:
Buildings : 30%
Artificial non-agricultural vegetated areas : 50%
Artificial Water Bodies : 5%
Streets and roads: 5%
Parking lots: 5%
7. Each polygon has one or more covers. If it has more than one, the photo interpreter
shall measure, and store in the database, the percentage of surface in which each
cover is present in the polygon. The sum of all percentages of each polygon must be
100 %.
8. Each cover may have one or more attributes. Attributes are parameters (of
biophysical or socio-economic criteria) that qualify the cover. These attributes take
different values in each instance (appearance of the cover).
During photo interpretation, for each of the covers present in the polygon, the value of
each of its parameters is evaluated and stored in the database in the form of variables
of the following types:
percentage (%)
integer
real
boolean
controlled list text
etc.
E.g.: irrigated? = yes
Average number of stories (for buildings) = 4
9. In some cases, we can establish certain conditions that the percentages of simple
covers or parameters values must accomplish in order to form a particular cover.
10. From this OODM database, it is possible derive as many views as necessary. One
view in made, assigning classes to certain combinations of covers and parameters
values. Each class could then have a visual representation to make a thematic
map. Standard CLC or Murbandy/Moland Nomenclatures would be predefined views
of the OODM database.

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4.a.v. Examples
In order to make these concepts more clear, here are some examples of real landscape situa-
tions, and its codification in:
- Murbandy/Moland Nomenclature
- Object Oriented Data Model

Figure 2: Examples of codification

4.a.vi. Extensions of the Data Model

Once we have a database made with the OODM concept described here, it is very likely that
some other person or institution has the need to input additional information of a specialized
field. E.g.: agricultural, forestry, infrastructures, etc.
In these cases, it should be easy to extend the Data Model, using one or more of these
techniques:
Subdivide one UML class into multiple classes
Add more UML classes
Add values to controlled list text parameters
Add more parameters to some classes.
Add conditions that parameters should comply.
Add types of objects (concepts) that can be associated to each
polygon (at the same level as cover)
etc.

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4.a.vii. Backward compatibility and comparability

One of the premises of the Data Model proposed is that it must be possible to obtain
automatically a standard Corine Nomenclature database, and also a standard Moland
Nomenclature database from the OODM database.
This assures backward compatibility and comparability with pre-existent databases, as
CLC90, CLC00, Murbandy, etc.
As said before, standard CLC or Murbandy/Moland Nomenclatures would be predefined
views of the OODM database.

4.a.viii. SIOSE conceptual data model

The objective when designing the Conceptual Data Model of Land Cover-Land use was it
must be normalized, interoperable, following the features:
Multi-criteria: Considering concepts such as land cover, land use.
Multi-parameter: Several attributes for a unique polygon.
Object - Oriented: Using UML to define the Entity Relationship Model for future
interchange and dissemination.
Can be easily extended in future
The final SIOSE data model has been reached by consensus of all the thematic working
groups and the national and regional administrations involved in the project:
Harmonization of nomenclatures of the different national and regional
Spanish Land cover- Land use databases
Codification
Interchange between nomenclatures
Data Model Diagram using UML
Following all these considerations, the characteristics of the data model for the SIOSE project
are:
It has a division between Land cover (biophysical criteria) and Land use
(socioeconomic criteria):
Cover: directly related to land occupation in the polygons surface; therefore,
cover can be directly obtained by its biophysical properties.
Use: directly related to socioeconomic activities on the land (polygons
surface). Therefore, a polygon could be associated to one-to-many uses
There is only one geometric entity class in SIOSE (POLYGON)
The complex classes in SIOSE are created by association of single classes
Polygon (geometry and topology): comply with the Geographical Council specifications
(based on ISO19107, ISO19137 standards).
SIOSE Data model try to keep CLC nomenclature, as long as it contains all the
semantic necessary information for the different users. But mixed CLC classes will not
be kept.
SIOSE Data model use thesaurus (list of terms hierarchically related) for the
organization of the classes that could be modified or extended later.

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It describes abstract classes and relations, and some characteristic attributes, linked to
the existing land cover / uses nomenclatures. So it is not the SIOSE physical data
model.
SIOSE Conceptual Data model: Entity Relation Data model in UML notation (Unified
Modeling Language). It provides normalized notation about classes and relations
between them, according to ISO TC211 and Open Gis Consortium recommendations.
This standardized notation provides flexibility to the model, so that the thematic
working groups and future users can modify and extend it easily

Figure 3: SIOSE conceptual data model

4.b. Harmonisation of databases

The objective of the harmonisation is to avoid duplicity of costs in the generation of
geographic information, in order to obtain a database that partially integrates or collects the
geographic information generated by other institutions.
The SIOSE database will be harmonised with some topographic and thematic databases
existent in Spain. It is to be expected that the thematic information provided by the SIOSE
database were concordant with other information from thematic national databases. Also the
geometry must be concordant with these databases, always keeping in mind the different
scales of generation.
In the SIOSE project has been taken into account the next features of these databases:
Geometry of communication routes from the National Topographic Map scale 1:25.000
(MTN25)
Geometry of hydrographic information from the National Topographic Map scale
1:25.000 (MTN25)

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Geometry of limits of and urban land and arterial streets from the urban cadastral
information
Geometry and thematic information from the Crops and Uses Map from the Agriculture
Ministry (1:50.000) and Forestry Map from the Environmental Ministry (1:50.000).
The geometry and thematic harmonisation with other Spanish geographic databases has
been reached by a consensus between the institutions in charge of them. In the production of
SIOSE database, if an update of these databases is needed, indicated by the image SPOT5
2.5 m, it will be communicated to the institution in charge of them, in order to they can take
the appropriate measures.

CONCLUSIONS
Using the principles described briefly in this document, will it make possible to produce more
coherent and useful land cover / land use databases.
Spain proposes EU institutions with responsibility in land cover / land use information to adopt
a similar philosophy for future European land cover / land use databases: Corine, GMES,
etc

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