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OpenStreetMap in GIScience pp 273–293Cite as

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

Part of the Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography book series (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.

Keywords

  • Volunteered geographic information (VGI)
  • OpenStreetMap (OSM)
  • Land use
  • Land cover

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ISEGI, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Jacinto Estima & Marco Painho

Authors
  1. Jacinto Estima
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  2. Marco Painho
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jacinto Estima .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. GIScience research group, Institute of Geography, Heidelberg, Germany

    Jamal Jokar Arsanjani

  2. Geography, Institute of Geography, Heidelberg, Germany

    Alexander Zipf

  3. Department of Computer Science, Maynooth University, Maynooth Co Kildare, Kildare, Ireland

    Peter Mooney

  4. Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Marco Helbich

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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

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