You know what land cover is but does anyone else? ... an investigation into semantic and ontological confusion

Information derived from remotely sensed data is increasingly being used to describe land cover and landscape structure for a range of applications. Users in different disciplines may use this information, although they may have different perceptions of land cover from those who created the information. They may be unaware of the origin of the information or its meaning and they may treat it as if it were data. Current paradigms for reporting meta-data and data quality do not adequately communicate the producer's knowledge, and should be extended to describe the conceptual, semantic and ontological meanings of land cover.