Corine Land Cover of Greece

The Corine Land Cover project22 is an activity of the European Environment Agency that collects data regarding the land cover of European countries. The project uses a hierarchical scheme with three levels to describe land cover. The first level indicates the major categories of land cover on the planet e.g., agricultural areas. The second level identifies more specific types of land cover, e.g., permanent crops, while the third level narrows down to a very specific characterization e.g., olive grives. The land cover of Greece is available as an ESRI shapefile that is based on this classification scheme. This shapefile is transformed in RDF as follows. Every land cover is represented with a class e.g, ConiferousForest, and the hierarchy of land covers is expressed with the respective class taxonomy. For each specific area in the shapefile a unique URI is created and it is connected with an instance of the third level. Additionally, a data property of each area indicates its geometry. Some sample triples representing such an area are shown in the following triples: corine:Area_45 a corine:Area; strdf:hasGeometry "POLYGON((22.07 40.62, ..., 22.07 40.62))"^^strdf:WKT; corine:hasLandUse corine:coniferousForest.