Does anyone have any knowledge/links about where they get their landclass data from? Its an automated process based on satellite data im guessing?
Capturing landcover (as opposed to capturing 'landclass') is pretty involved. Environment Bay of Plenty bought some satellite captured, algorithm processed landcover data a few years back and that wasnt particularly accurate either....and that was only for the BOP region! Its a huge task to generate that data for the WHOLE world, in many cases with no local knowledge of what the area 'should' look like.
The majority of the Landcover capture we do is digitised on screen in reference to aerial photos with multiple people capturing and it still takes months to complete a project (ie The Rotorua Lakes which we have done recently)....
From a Geospatial professional's point of view, what Microsoft has achieved in teh base product is pretty damn impressive IMHO......and downloading/making all the addons is half the fun isnt it?
