The objective of Open Land Use for Africa (OLU4Africa) is to build an open seamless harmonized vector multipurpose and multilayer land use and land cover map of Africa from available open data sources. Land cover and land use themes are important for many human activities and actions, while their availability and up-to-date validity is a very important aspect. OLU4Africa is being populated by datasets from African regions such as the Africover project and CCI Land Cover 2016 and newer, which has done the land cover mapping of particular African countries. Then, it was possible to use other tags from OpenStreetMap to identify land use except for the ‘landuse’ tag. For example, ‘natural’, ‘amenity’, ‘leisure’ tags, and so on. ESA CCI LAND COVER map and classification of images from Earth observation satellite data are being incorporated into the process of creating the OLU4Africa as well.
The OLU4Africa will be enriched with other available thematic datasets in the next development; especially focused on current LULC on medium and large scales. Availability and accessibility of this product can help for example detect changes in ecosystems at the area of interest from LULC and climatic perspective as well. OLU4Africa is being incorporated into the SmartAfriHub platform (www.smartafrihub.com).

https://www.smartafrihub.com/cs/map1/?hs-panel=layermanager&hs-x=3704380.1962389457&hs-y=-367055.71573845576&hs-z=6.103064012655535&hs-visible-layers=OpenStreetMap%3BOLU%20polygon%20borders%20in%20Uganda%3Blandcover%20in%20the%20whole%20Uganda%20by%20cci20%20dataset%3BOLU%20polygon%20borders%20in%20Kenya%3Blandcover%20in%20the%20whole%20Kenya%20by%20cci20%20dataset%3BOLU%20polygon%20borders%20in%20Rwanda%3Blandcover%20in%20the%20whole%20Rwanda%20by%20cci20%20dataset%3BOLU%20polygon%20borders%20in%20Burundi%3Blandcover%20in%20the%20whole%20Burundi%20by%20cci20%20dataset%3BOLU%20polygon%20borders%20in%20Tanzania%3Blandcover%20in%20the%20whole%20Tanzania%20by%20cci20%20dataset%3Bclassification%20of%2040%20categories%3Bclassification%20pie%20charts%20of%2040%20categories&composition=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.smartafrihub.com%2Fhsl-layman%2Frest%2Fworkspaces%2Fhana_kubickova92%2Fmaps%2Fopen_land_use_2021_06_09&hs-permalink=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.smartafrihub.com%2Fshare%2F%3Frequest%3Dload%26id%3Ddbf3958f-5916-405e-a029-a656c6c62793

• Africa

• Remote and rural communities
• farmers, agronomists, developers, researchers

OLU4Africa is based on the OLU 2.0 data model, which has already been used for different areas of interest. The database is from a historical reason called Open Land Use, but it is connected also with Land cover aspects. The OLU data model 2.0 is a complex database model addressing different requirements for integrating, analyzing, and data visualization. The goal is to support the building of future Earth Oriented Digital Twins. The main idea of the OLU data model is to flexibly incorporate thematic attributes from different domains by defining a structure of reference geometries and variable adding of thematic attributes to the OLU database. The whole OLU product is based on standards and open-source technologies such as ISO standards for spatial data (standards series 19100), standardized web-based services (OGC WMS, OGC WFS), and API for individual spatial objects. This is why the project is replicable generally for a different spatial-temporal domain.

Using the Digital Innovation Hub called SmartAfriHub, which is operated by the association Plan4All z.s., ensures the further sustainability and development of this project. The idea is also to integrate this database with other repositories like the Regional Center for Mapping of Resources for Development and also make this new data available on OSM. The idea is to use the data sets in research projects, but also for commercial purposes.

To guarantee discovery and access based on FAIR principles to processed Earth Observation and other data through Digital Innovation Hub of SmartAfriHub for the sake of the region of interest. The data will be available and discoverable using standard search tools based on Open Search.