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GIScience Blog

Category: Publications

  • Beyond 3-D: The New Spectrum of LiDAR Applications for Earth and Ecological Sciences

    Capturing and quantifying the world in three dimensions (x,y,z) using light detection and ranging (lidar) technology drives fundamental advances in the Earth and Ecological Sciences (EES). However, additional lidar dimensions offer the possibility to transcend basic 3-D mapping capabilities, including i) the physical time (t) dimension from repeat lidar acquisition and ii) laser return intensity…

  • Social Media Data: Topological Outliers and Their Influence on Spatial Analysis

    Social media data is one of the recent and prominent sources of georefrenced social information. It allows in-situ insights into the everyday lifes of ordinary people. For all that, social media data also confronts us with considerable analytical challenges. One of these challenges is the mingling of different user habits, functions of geographic space and,…

  • Full-Waveform Airborne Laser Scanning in Vegetation Studies—A Review of Point Cloud and Waveform Features for Tree Species Classification

    In recent years, small-footprint full-waveform airborne laser scanning has become readily available and established for vegetation studies in the fields of forestry, agriculture and urban studies. Independent of the field of application and the derived final product, each study uses features to classify a target object and to assess its characteristics (e.g., tree species). These…

  • European Handbook of Crowdsourced Geographic Information

    Recently, a new open access handbook edited by Capineri, et.al and supported by the European Commission – COST Action IC1203 (ENERGIC) has been published. This book focuses on the study of the remarkable new source of geographic information that has become available in the form of user-generated content accessible over the Internet through mobile and…

  • Defining Fitness-for-Use for Crowdsourced Points of Interest (POI)

    Due to the advent of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), large datasets of user-generated Points of Interest (POI) are now available. As with all VGI, however, there is uncertainty concerning data quality and fitness-for-use. Currently, the task of evaluating fitness-for-use of POI is left to the data user, with no guidance framework being available which is…

  • Using participatory geographic approaches for urban flood risk in Santiago de Chile: Insights from a governance analysis

    Studies based on information acquired by participative geographic approaches have sought to cope with emergency situations and disasters such as floods. However, the impact of these approaches to flood risk governance systems in order to understand these types of events as a complete risk cycle is still not clear. In a recent paper, we analyse…

  • Community Engagement Strategies for Crowdsourcing Accessibility Information

    Social innovations are increasingly being seen as a way of compensating for insufficiencies of both, state and market to create inclusive and accessible environments. In a recent paper, together with researchers from Zentrum für Soziale Innovation (Vienna) and Polibienestar Research Institute (Valencia), we have explored crowdsourcing accessibility information as a form of social innovation, requiring…

  • An Overview on supporting Disaster Management through Crowdsourcing Geographic Information

    The “Ruperto Carola” research magazine reports on scientific findings and current research projects at Heidelberg University. The current issue “North & South” refers to the „International Year of Global Understanding“ and features among others a short overview article on some of the work that is done at the GIScience Research Group Heidelberg with respect to…

  • GIScience HD @AGIT 2016

    Last week members of the GIScience Research Group were attending the AGIT – Symposium and Exhibit for applied Geoinformatics in Salzburg. Beside the interesting welcome note given by Anita Graser from AIT talking about the Open Data, Open Source and Open Services and the impact for Geospatial Information Systems, further keynotes and conference talks followed,…

  • Where the Streets Have Known Names – Linking Wikidata with OpenStreetMap

    Street names provide important insights into the local culture, history, and politics of places. Linked open data provide a wealth of knowledge that can be associated with street names, enabling novel ways to explore cultural geographies. A recent paper presents a three-fold contribution. We present (1) a technique to establish a correspondence between street names…

  • Four contributions from GIScience Heidelberg at the ISPRS Congress in Prague

    The LiDAR Research Group (LRG) of GIScience Heidelberg is contributing novel approaches for geological outcrop characterization, LiDAR simulation, tree classification as well as education in close-range sensing. You are kindly invited to visit our presentations at the ISPRS Congress 2016 in Prague. Furthermore our new HELIOS LiDAR Simulator will participate in the CATCON contest for…

  • Local-scale flood mapping on vegetated floodplains from radiometrically calibrated airborne LiDAR dat

    Knowledge about the magnitude of localised flooding of riverine areas is crucial for appropriate land management and administration at regional and local levels. However, detection and delineation of localised flooding with remote sensing techniques are often hampered on floodplains by the presence of herbaceous vegetation. To address this problem, our very recent paper presents the…