The EAGLE concept - A vision of a future European Land Monitoring Framework

This paper describes the EAGLE concept, an object-oriented data model for land monitoring. It highlights the background situation in the field of land monitoring, identifies the team involved, explains the technical and strategic considerations behind the concept, describes the current status of the harmonization and the developments made and outlines the future activities and requirements. After the structure and the content of the data model and matrix are explained, examples are given on how to use the matrix. Besides its possible function as a semantic translation tool between different classification systems, it also can help to analyze class definitions to find semantic gaps, overlaps and inconsistencies and can serve as data model for new mapping initiatives. On the long-term, the EAGLE concept aims at sketching a vision of a future integrated and harmonized European land monitoring system, which is designed to store all kinds of environmentally relevant information on the Earth s surface, coming from both national and European data sources. Being still in the state of development, some first applications and test cases are under way. This paper also dedicates a chapter referring to the context between the concept and remote sensing in general as well as the relation between land monitoring and the principles of the European Commission s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme.