Category: Publications
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Improving the Quality of Cartographic Labeling
The lettering process, including assigning names to point features, is an essential part of map production. While there have been numerous and varied research efforts to automate point-feature label placement (PFLP), none of them seems to have taken into account the many well-established cartographic precepts for point-feature annotation used by human cartographers. As a result,…
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Measuring the Reliability of Wheelchair User Route Planning based on Volunteered Geographic Information (OpenStreetMap)
The development of a wheelchair user friendly route planning application inherits a number of special requirements and details that need to be considered during the generation of the routing graph and the corresponding algorithm, making this task much more complex than car or pedestrian related applications. Each wheelchair type and, more importantly, each individual user…
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Special Issue “Remote Sensing and GIS for Habitat Quality Monitoring”
Website: http://www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing/special_issues/rs-habitatmonitoring This Special Issue, “Remote Sensing and GIS for Habitat Quality Monitoring”, aims to pave the way for operational habitat quality monitoring from earth observation data for more effective habitat conservation. The demand for protecting biodiversity has been underlined by a number of recent international agreements, while the increasing size of protected habitats calls…
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Exploiting Big VGI to Improve Routing and Navigation Services
Due to development of communication technologies, the amount of data, which each organization has to deal with, has been rapidly growing. The huge volumes of data appear as an opportunity to improve the performance and reliability of various applications, as such routing and navigation services can be named. However, the analysis of large datasets, commonly…
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Mapping collective human activity based on mobile phone data
Identifying and characterizing variations of human activity – specifically changes in intensity and similarity – in urban environments provide insights into the social component of those eminently complex systems. Using large volumes of user-generated mobile phone data, we derive mobile communication profiles that we use as a proxy for the collective human activity. In this…
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Fusion of human and remote sensor data in urban environments
OpenStreetMap (OSM) currently represents the most popular project of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI): geodata are collected by common people and made available for public use. Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) enables the acquisition of high-resolution digital elevation models that are used for many applications. Our new study combines the advantages of both ALS and OSM, offering…
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GIS-Based Roughness Derivation for Flood Simulations
Natural disasters like floods are a worldwide phenomenon and a serious threat to mankind. Flood simulations are applications of disaster control, which are used for the development of appropriate flood protection. Adequate simulations require not only the geometry but also the roughness of the Earth’s surface, as well as the roughness of the objects hereon.…
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A Review of OpenStreetMap Research
User-generated content (UGC) platforms on the Internet have experienced a steep increase in data contributions in recent years. The ubiquitous usage of location-enabled devices, such as smartphones, allows contributors to share their geographic information on a number of selected online portals. The collected information is oftentimes referred to as volunteered geographic information (VGI). One of…
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Members of GIScience research group receive the best paper and presentation award of SCCH’2013 Conference
The fourth conference on Scientific Computing and Cultural Heritage (SCCH) 2013 organized by Heidelberg Graduate School of Mathematical and Computational Methods for the Sciences (HGS MathComp) took place on 18th of November 2013 at the University of Heidelberg. This conference brought together scientists from computer science and applied mathematics on the one hand and researchers…
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New WebPortals by GeoNet.MRN – Network, Energy Atlas, etc.
Our “Network Geoinformation of the Metropole Region Rhine-Neckar” has a new updated Web Portal at http://www.geonet-mrn.de. Also the first prototype of the interactive Web-based Energy Atlas http://energie.geoportal-mrn.de/ for the Metropole Region Rhein-Neckar went online already some time ago. Recently our Master Student Sabrina Helsper has developed a Atlas on thermal energy for all of Germany…
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The emergence and evolution of OpenStreetMap: A cellular automata approach
Collaborative mapping projects, such as OpenStreetMap (OSM), have received tremendous amounts of contributed data from voluntary participants over time. So far, most research efforts deal with data quality issues, but the OSM evolution across space and over time has not been noted. Therefore, a new study is dedicated to the evolution of the contributed information…
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About quality assessment for building footprints data in OpenStreetMap
In the past years, several applications of generating 3D buildings from OpenStreetMap (OSM) have been made available, for instance, OSM-3D, OSM2World, etc. In these projects, 3D buildings are reconstructed using the buildings’ footprints and information about their attributes, which are documented as tags in OSM. Therefore, the quality of 3D buildings relies strongly on the…