Land Use Dataset Collection And Publication Based On Lucas And Hilucs

Spatial data have become very important phenomena within the last decade in Europe due to a strong support from the political spectrum with regard to related legislation and resulting in financial support to several research, educational, and enlargement projects. INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community) Directive indeed defines the principles for the harmonization of spatial data infrastructure in the European community, including Land Use and Land Cover data themes. INSPIRE defines a methodology on how to transform datasets to common data models, but it does not cover the process of data collection and update, because it is out of its scope. Evaluation of the Land Use dataset derived from remote sensing products complemented by fieldworks has been realized since 2006 by Eurostat within the LUCAS (Land Use and Cover Area frame Survey) project. The work presented in this paper follows the LUCAS fieldwork methodology, which was applied during the fieldwork in July 2014 in the City of Zagreb (Croatia), to use at the local (municipal) geoportal level. The surveying groups collected point features with the following data type attributes: Land Use codes defined by HILUCS (Hierarchical INSPIRE Land Use Classification System) and optional Land Cover codes defined by LUCAS classification. In addition, photographs representing the observed areas were collected by cameras embedded in the mobile GIS platforms. An update of original topological layer was performed and Web GIS components for sharing the newly developed datasets were implemented. The results presented provide a suitable proposal for fieldworks methodology and updates of a land use database in line with the INSPIRE directive applicable at a local spatial data infrastructure level.