The GIScience Research Group at Heidelberg University and the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) are happy to share the their GIScience github repository contains now already over 50 open source repositories and it’s still growing. These contain results from several research projects and in particular also some very active long term activities. Most of the tools and services are related to OpenStreetMap and related Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) sources, but also 3D geodata e.g. the Heidelberg LiDAR Operations Simulator Helios, the Voxel Octree Solar Toolkit Vostok, the 3D WebGIS framework GIScene.js etc.
The oldest and certainly largest project are all the services and growing ecosystem around Openrouteservice. E.g. there is a QGIS plugin, geoJSON support, a very handy Python library, one for Java and JavaScript and a library for R stats users. ORS includes not only routing, geocoding, maps or isochrones (the isochrones also support population statistics) on an interactive web map (maps.openrouteservice.org), but APIs for those and further services such as time-distance matrix calculations or a POI API (openpoiservice) – all with professional documentation. ORS supports more specialised routing profiles than ever: from heavy vehicles, wheelchairs, e-bikes to fitness-level biking and others with many options each.
Another major activity is related to intrinsic OSM quality measures, mostly based on analysing the history and metadata of OSM (including the osm wiki). This includes several active projects, such as ohsome, oshdb, osm-measures, osm-vis, osmatrix, iOSManalyzer, etc.
Several other repositories are related to supporting humanitarian organizations like MissingMaps (RedCross, Doctors Without Borders, etc.) and HOTOSM with tools for improving and analysing crowdsourced geographic information, e.g. MapSwipe analytics, the HOT critical number tool, osm-analytics, or also the Realtime OSM service, that is needed for updating the openrouteservice for disaster management.
There are also some more generic (e.g. libraries for discrete global grid Systems: geogrid) or even more special tools (incline from osm gps tracks) you may want to explore on your own… Have fun!
See all the current projects at https://github.com/GIScience. There are some further activities and old projects that still need to be added to the repository, so stay tuned for future updates. And of course we are looking forward to contributions from whoever wants to work with us. Feel invited 🙂
