Last friday the GIScience Research Group was invited to participate in a follow-up workshop on “Open Data”.
Already in December 2015 the GIScience Research Group and the disastermappers heidelberg had been invited to present their work on Open Data in the 10th “Modellierungstag” of the Heidelberg Graduate School of Mathematical and Computational Methods for the Sciences (HGS MathComp) ). In two talks Prof. Alexander Zipf and Benjamin Herfort presented the use of VGI & OpenStreetMap in general and in disaster management in particular.
During the open tables session at the follow-up workshop last week we presented several of the open data services and applications that were developed by the GIScience Research Group that support disaster management. The format of the workshops allowed us to provide deeper insights about the systems, interact with interested participants and thus to respond to fundamental questions about OpenStreetMap and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI).
The discussions included many beneficial perspectives on the potential but also on the challenges of Open Data in a disaster management context.
In case you missed the session, here you find a very brief overview of our systems and services presented:
– OpenRouteService (http://openrouteservice.org/):
Routing service that uses OpenStreetMap data with additional functionality like avoid areas and bypass blocked roads
– OpenFloodRiskMap (https://ofrm.de):
Find critical infrastructures for a region of interest, use OpenRoutService for planning of evacuation or coordination of relief forces, combine both to prepare flood protection plan
– PyBossa Microtasking (http://crowdmap.geog.uni-heidelberg.de/): Micro crowdsourcing tasks for classification and validation purposes
