UK Land Cover Map Production Through the Generalisation of OS MasterMap®

Earth Observation (EO) data is seen as a major source of information to characterise the Earth's surface, but is conventionally analysed using pixel-based approaches that do not incorporate the concept of landscape features or real-world objects. The UK land cover maps to date have been developed in an attempt to exploit landscape features to improve the quality and accuracy of their derived products. For Land Cover Map 2007 (LCM2007) landscape features will be derived from a generalised version of OS MasterMap to capture the required real-world objects. This paper describes the generalisation process that aligns the scale of the landscape features with the information content of high spatial resolution EO data as the first step in the production of LCM2007.