OntoLULC-SOTA: An ontology based approach to make systematic reviews for LULC data

Abstract. Land Use (LU) and Land Cover (LC) data allow us to understand the physical and human activities associated with a given land. Thus, LULC is a dynamic and highly researched field. LULC review papers are numerous and provide high-level insights about the proposed approaches, the data used, the study cases, the strengths and limitations, and the identification of new research gaps. Nevertheless, these reviews are not systematic and reproducible. The goal of this work is to propose an ontology to help the research community conduct systematic and shareable literature reviews and comparable analytical analyses of scientific papers. To achieve this, we formalize their metadata, content, strengths, and weaknesses. In particular, we consider the scientific paper as the central element of our ontology and we define formal semantics for all relevant items (data process, LULC life cycle and scientific paper). We hope to open the path to more efficient synthesis, discovery, and reuse of research outcomes from the literature. To facilitate the instantiation process and make it accessible to a broader range of researchers, we designed a tabular-based template. We used our template to simulate the process of conducting a literature review on three use cases: building function, global land cover mapping, and multi-class change detection.