ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the specific international experiences gathered over time with land-use and land-cover categorizations using parameterized approaches. Categorization is part of human nature to facilitate communication of knowledge. Moving from one observational scale to another, that is, from the national to district, alters the behavior of the categories chosen for studying the phenomenon. The differences in behavior may arise for a variety of reasons: variations in intensity, new or unexpected elements, actors, or factors that appear at some observational scales but not at others. As physical and social characteristics of communities vary in space and time, so do land-use choices. Categorization produces (hierarchical) data sets comprising classes that have different semantic contents. The difference in categorization, and thus in semantic contents of data, is another often ignored issue related to model parameterization.
