RURAL LAND USE MONITORING INFORMATION MODELING 
Zhu Zesheng 3, Sun Ling b Guan Hengshen 2 
*JiangSu Academy Of Agricultural Sciences, Nanjing, JiangSu, 210014, P. R. China 
*Nanjing Naval Institute of Electronic Engineering, Nanjing, JiangSu, 211800, P. R. China 
KEY WORDS: Agriculture, Land, Management, Modeling, Method 
ABSTRACT 
The development of precision farming has led to a critical need in monitoring rural land resource and its use. 
Furthermore, since the monitoring information is provided by multiple rural land providers, managers and users, a 
common infrastructure is required over which this information can be processed. One of the critical components of 
a comprehensive and monitoring framework is the monitoring information model to be used. The monitoring . 
information essentially plays two roles: information associated with monitoring process, and information 
representing physical and logical resources subject to monitoring. This paper provides a discussion of modeling 
principles and concepts as contained in the monitoring information model. The model has emerged as an object- 
oriented paradigm for the modeling rural land systems and resources for use in monitoring. The model is designed 
to meet the needs of rural land users, providers and managers. By using the above modeling principles, it has been 
possible to develop a rural land use monitoring model powerful and flexible enough to meet rural land use 
monitoring requirements expected in the 21st century. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
Monitoring, the dynamic collection, interpretation, and 
presentation of information about rural land use is 
needed for the management and development of 
precision farming. The information gathered is used to 
make management decisions and perform the 
appropriate control actions on rural land use. 
Management of rural land use involves monitoring the 
activity of the use, making management decisions and 
performing control actions to modify the behavior of 
the use. Most of the research on monitoring has 
concentrated on monitoring mechanisms related to 
single simple rural land use. However, in order to 
automate the monitoring of very complex rural land 
use, it is necessary to be able to represent and 
manipulate monitoring policy within the system of 
rural land use. These objectives are typically set out in 
the form of general policies into a number of more 
specific policies to form a policy hierarchy in which 
each policy in the hierarchy represents, to its maker, his 
plans to meet his objectives and, to its subject, the 
objectives which be must plan to meet. 
With the emergence of precision farming, the 
information of rural land use also is distributed 
throughout a very large geographical area. This 
situation has led to a critical need in managing the 
information. Furthermore, since the information needs 
of users are provided by multiple service providers, a 
190 
common infrastructure is required over which this 
information can be communicated. 
2. BASIC FRAMEWORK 
One of the critical components of a comprehensive 
framework of management system of rural land 
resource is the monitoring information model to be 
used. This information essentially plays two roles as the 
followings. 
(1)The information is associated with monitoring 
process; and 
(2)The information represents physical and logical 
resources subject to monitoring, 
Information associated with monitoring process is 
concerned with such entities as customer records, 
owner: records, use records, log records, etc. 
Representing this information involves the modeling of 
the process and defining the information associated 
with that process. The information associated with a 
monitoring process generally is manipulated only by 
monitoring operations. Information representing 
physical and logical resources is concerned with such 
entities as the abstraction of rural land use, event 
monitoring  discriminators, etc. Representing this 
information requires modeling some aspects of the 
resource that are of interest to monitoring. Once this 
abstraction has been made, the totality of the resource 
from the management's viewpoint is represented by 
International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXII, Part 7, Budapest, 1998