On Tuesday 17th January, the CAP4Access/MyAccessible.EU came to a close after three years with the successful completion of the final European Commission review meeting in Brussels. Reviewers were highly pleased with the outcomes of the project, both on the technical and societal fronts.
At GIScience in Heidelberg, through the EC FP7 project we have extended the OpenRouteService to take into account properties of the environment that affect people with reduced mobility, developed a new landmark based navigation service based on routes obtained from the ORS and deployed methods that allow novice users to contribute to OpenStreetMap through the use of “OSM Notes”. Tools for assessing the quality of OSM data have also been developed and extended such as OSMatrix and the inclusion of a “Why is it Routing this Way?” tool on the ORS which shows the features around a route that influence the way it goes (i.e. the location of kerbs that are not dropped). Within the city of Heidelberg, cooperation has taken place with The Heidelberg Advisory Committee of Persons with Disabilities and several events have taken place to collect accessibility information about places in the city into OSM and WheelMap.
From GIScience Heidelberg, Amin Mobasheri and Adam Rousell participated in the final review meeting. Amin gave two presentations regarding developement of open source tools and technologies for data quality assessment as well as the lessons learned from management of piloting activities in Heidelberg, Germany. Furthermore, Adam also gave two presentations regarding the routing and navigation services, and the collective tagging mobile application.
In case you are interested to know more about the details of our work within the CAP4Access project please check the page here, as well as the news related to this project throughout the past three years.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been involved in this project and helped to make it a success and a truly enjoyable experience. We look forward to continued cooperation with members of the project consortium. We will continue to work on related issues e.g. improving OSM data quality and route planning within the GIScience Research Group Heidelberg and HeiGIT (Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology).
Below are some impressions from CAP4Access team in the annual review meetings (in Brussels) and the first kick-off meeting (in London).
