Formalisation of soil-landscape knowledge through interactive hierarchicaldisaggregation

The soil-landscape model strongly depends on scarcely documented expert kno wledge. In this paper a methodological framework is formulated that takes a dvantage of a GIS to interactively formalise soil-landscape knowledge using stepwise image interpretation and inductive learning of soil-landscape rel ationships. It examines topology to keep record of potential part of relati onships between retrain objects denoting discontinuities in soil formation regimes. The relationships are used to visualise the pathway along which te rrain objects have been derived. They can be applied in similar areas to fa cilitate image interpretation by restricting possible lower-level terrain o bjects. The framework may adopt different inductive methods to describe soi l variation in relation to a terrain description. It is illustrated using s tratification of soil texture data according to terrain object classes in a case study within the Guadalhorce basin in southern Spain. The degree of a ssociation between terrain object classes and particle size classes increas ed from 6% to 38% in three steps of image interpretation. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.