Skip to main content

Investigating the Potential of OpenStreetMap for Land Use/Land Cover Production: A Case Study for Continental Portugal

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Book cover OpenStreetMap in GIScience

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography ((LNGC))

Abstract

In the last decade, volunteers have been contributing massively to what we know nowadays as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). Through the research that has been conducted recently, it has become clear that this huge amount of information might hide interesting and rich geographical information. The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project is one of the most well-known and studied VGI initiatives. It has been studied to identify its potential for different applications. In the field of Land Use/Cover, an earlier study by the authors explored the use of OSM for Land Use/Cover (LULC) validation. Using the COoRdination of INformation on the Environment (CORINE) Land Cover (CLC) database as the Land Use reference data, they analyzed the OSM coverage and classification accuracy, finding an interesting global accuracy value of 76.7 % for level 1 land classes, for the study area of continental Portugal, despite a very small coverage value of approximately 3.27 %. In this chapter we review the existing literature on using OSM data for LULC database production and move this research forwards by exploring the suitability of the OSM Points of Interest dataset. We conclude that OSM can give very interesting contributions and that the OSM Points of Interest dataset is suitable for those classified as CLC class 1 which represents artificial surfaces.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Barron C, Neis P, Zipf A (2014) A comprehensive framework for intrinsic OpenStreetMap quality analysis. Trans GIS. doi:10.1111/tgis.12073

    Google Scholar 

  • Baulies X, Szejwach G (1997) Survey of needs, gaps and priorities on data for land use/land cover change research. Report presented at LUCC data requirements workshop. Barcelona, Spain, 11–14 Nov 1997

    Google Scholar 

  • Caetano M, Mata F, Freire S (2006) Accuracy assessment of the Portuguese CORINE Land Cover map. Glob Dev Environ Earth Obs Space:459–467

    Google Scholar 

  • Cihlar J (2000) Land cover mapping of large areas from satellites: status and research priorities. Int J Remote Sens 21(6–7):1093–1114. doi:10.1080/014311600210092

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Clark ML, Aide TM (2011) Virtual interpretation of earth web-interface tool (VIEW-IT) for collecting land-use/land-cover reference data. Remote Sens 3(3):601–620. doi:10.3390/rs3030601

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Corine Land Cover Nomenclature (2011) Corine land cover nomenclature illustrated guide. In: Joint meeting Geoland2—EAGLE. Málaga, Spain, 23–24 June. http://sia.eionet.europa.eu/EAGLE/EAGLE_6thMeeting_g2_Malaga/04d_Nomenclature_CLC.pdf. Accessed 5 Jun 2014

  • Ellis E (2013) Land-use and land-cover change. In: The encyclopedia of earth. http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/51cbee4f7896bb431f696e92. Accessed 10 May 2014

  • Elwood S, Goodchild MF, Sui DZ (2012) Researching volunteered geographic information: spatial data, geographic research, and new social practice. Ann Assoc Am Geogr 102(3):571–590. doi:10.1080/00045608.2011.595657

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Estima J, Painho M (2013a) Exploratory analysis of OpenStreetMap for land use classification. In: Proceedings of the second ACM SIGSPATIAL international workshop on crowdsourced and volunteered geographic information—GEOCROWD ’13. ACM Press, pp 39–46. doi:10.1145/2534732.2534734

  • Estima J, Painho M (2013b) Flickr geotagged and publicly available photos: preliminary study of its adequacy for helping quality control of corine land cover. In: Murgante B, Misra S, Carlini M, Torre CM, Nguyen HQ, Taniar D, Gervasi O (eds) ICCSA 2013: computational science and its applications. The 13th international conference on computational science and its Applications, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 24-27 June 2013 . Lecture notes in computer science, vol 7974. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 205–220. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-39649-6_15

  • Estima J, Painho M (2014) photo based volunteered geographic information initiatives: a comparative study of their suitability for helping quality control of corine land cover. Int J Agric Environ Inf Syst 5(3):75–92. doi:10.4018/ijaeis.2014070105

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • European Environment Agency (2014) http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/clc-2006-vector-data-version-2. Accessed 5 Jun 2014

  • Fan H, Zipf A, Fu Q, Neis P (2014) Quality assessment for building footprints data on OpenStreetMap. Int J Geogr Inf Sci 28(4):700–719. doi:10.1080/13658816.2013.867495

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Flickr (2014) https://www.flickr.com/. Accessed 5 Jun 2014

  • Foody GM, Boyd DS (2013) Using volunteered data in land cover map validation: mapping West African forests. IEEE J Sel Top Appl Earth Obs Remote Sens 6(3):1305–1312. doi:10.1109/JSTARS.2013.2250257

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fritz S, McCallum I, Schill C, Perger C, Grillmayer R, Achard F, Obersteiner M (2009) Geo-Wiki.Org: The use of crowdsourcing to improve global land cover. Remote Sens 1(3):345–354. doi:10.3390/rs1030345

  • Fritz S, McCallum I, Schill C, Perger C, See L, Schepaschenko D, Obersteiner M (2012) Geo-Wiki: an online platform for improving global land cover. Environ Model Softw 31:110–123. doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2011.11.015

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Geofabrik (2014) http://www.geofabrik.de/. Accessed 5 Jun 2014

  • GMapCreator (2014) http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/casa/latest/software/gmap_creator. Accessed 5 Jun 2014

  • Goodchild M (2007) Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography. GeoJournal 69(4):211–221. doi:10.1007/s10708-007-9111-y

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goodchild M (2008a) Assertion and authority: the science of user-generated geographic content. In: Proceedings of the Colloquium for Andrew U. Frank’s 60th birthday. Department of Geoinformation and Cartography, Vienna, Austria

    Google Scholar 

  • Goodchild M (2008b) Commentary: whither VGI? GeoJournal 72(3–4):239–244. doi:10.1007/s10708-008-9190-4

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goodchild M, Glennon JA (2010) Crowdsourcing geographic information for disaster response: a research frontier. Int J Digit Earth 3(3):231–241. doi:10.1080/17538941003759255

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Google MyMaps (2014) https://www.google.com/maps/d/. Accessed 5 Jun 2014

  • Hagenauer J, Helbich M (2012) Mining urban land-use patterns from volunteered geographic information by means of genetic algorithms and artificial neural networks. Int J Geogr Inf Sci 26(6):963–982. doi:10.1080/13658816.2011.619501

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hecht R, Kunze C, Hahmann S (2013) Measuring completeness of building footprints in OpenStreetMap over space and time. ISPRS Int J Geo-Inf 2(4):1066–1091. doi:10.3390/ijgi2041066

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hollenstein L, Purves R (2010) Exploring place through user-generated content: using Flickr to describe city cores. J Spat Inf Sci 1(1):21–48. doi:10.5311/JOSIS.2010.1.3

    Google Scholar 

  • Holone H, Misund G, Holmstedt H (2007) Users are doing it for themselves: pedestrian navigation with user generated content. In: International conference on next generation mobile applications, services and technologies. IEEE, pp 91–99. doi: 10.1109/NGMAST.2007.4343406

  • Hudson-Smith A, Batty M, Crooks A, Milton R (2009) Mapping for the masses: accessing web 2.0 through crowdsourcing. Soc Sci Comput Rev 27(4):524–538. doi:10.1177/0894439309332299

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jokar Arsanjani J, Helbich M, Bakillah M (2013a) Exploiting volunteered geographic information to ease land use mapping of an urban landscape. In: International archives of the photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information sciences. 29th Urban data management symposium, vol XL-4/W1. London, United Kingdom, 29–31 May 2013

    Google Scholar 

  • Jokar Arsanjani JJ, Helbich M, Bakillah M, Hagenauer J, Zipf A (2013b) Toward mapping land-use patterns from volunteered geographic information. Int J Geogr Inf Sci 27(12):2264–2278. doi:10.1080/13658816.2013.800871

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jokar Arsanjani J, Vaz E (2015: in-press) An assessment of a collaborative mapping approach for exploring land use patterns for several European metropolises. Int J Appl Earth Obs Geoinf

    Google Scholar 

  • Leung D, Newsam S (2010) Proximate sensing: Inferring what-is-where from georeferenced photo collections. In: Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition CVPR. IEEE, San Francisco, CA, pp 2955–2962, 13–18 June 2010. doi:10.1109/CVPR.2010.5540040

  • London Profiler (2014) http://128.40.111.250/casa/websites/profiler.asp. Accessed 5 Jun 2014

  • MapTube (2014) http://www.maptube.org/. Accessed 5 Jun 2014

  • Mooney P, Corcoran P, Winstanley A (2010) A study of data representation of natural features in OpenStreetMap. In Proceedings of the 6th GIScience international conference on geographic information science, vol 150. Zurich, Switzerland, 14–17 Sept 2010

    Google Scholar 

  • OpenStreetMap Map Features (2014) http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Features. Accessed 5 Jun 2014

  • Perger C, Fritz S, See L, Schill C, Van Der Velde M, Mccallum I, Obersteiner M (2012) A campaign to collect volunteered geographic information on land cover and human impact. In GI Forum 2012: Geovizualisation, Society and Learning. pp 83–91

    Google Scholar 

  • Turner AJ (2006) Introduction to neogeography. Sebastopol, CA

    Google Scholar 

  • Wikimapia (2014) http://wikimapia.org/. Accessed 5 Jun 2014

  • Zook M, Graham M, Shelton T, Gorman S (2010) Volunteered geographic information and crowdsourcing disaster relief: a case study of the Haitian Earthquake. World Med Health Policy 2(2):6–32. doi:10.2202/1948-4682.1069

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jacinto Estima .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Estima, J., Painho, M. (2015). Investigating the Potential of OpenStreetMap for Land Use/Land Cover Production: A Case Study for Continental Portugal. In: Jokar Arsanjani, J., Zipf, A., Mooney, P., Helbich, M. (eds) OpenStreetMap in GIScience. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14280-7_14

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics