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GIScience Blog

Category: OSM

  • Healthy Routing presented at the SemGeoSoc Workshop

    The current status of ou Healthy Routing research was presented in the SemGeoSoc Workshop hosted by the Zürich University and organized by prominent researchers in the area of geoinformatics. The workshop offered the opportunity for presenting and discussing ongoing work on the areas of location-based services supported by VGI, social media, citizen & science and…

  • 10 years of OSM data history with OSM API 0.5

    As our HeiGIT / GIScience team member Martin Raifer (tyr_asd) pointed out at his OSM diary, this weekend is the 10 year anniversary of OSM’s API version 0.5. He stresses the importance of this as “This is the version of the OSM-API that introduced (among other things) the version number on all OSM objects, making…

  • The OpenStreetMap folksonomy and its evolution

    The comprehension of folksonomies is of high importance when making sense of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), in particular in the case of OpenStreetMap (OSM). So far, only little research has been conducted to understand the role and the evolution of folksonomies in VGI and OSM, which is despite the fact that without a comprehension of…

  • Open land cover from OpenStreetMap and remote sensing

    In a recently published study (1), we produced a web based land use land cover (LULC) product based on OSM tags which are constantly updated by contributors/volunteers, and present a Remote Sensing based solution when tags were absent for a test site. We harness the combined benefit of an open source and ever-growing machine generated…

  • GIScience group members at the ISPRS Geospatial Week 2017 in Wuhan, China

    Last week (Sept. 18-22, 2017), our six colleagues, Prof. Alexander Zipf, Doctoral Candidate Xuke Hu, Dr. Hongchao Fan, Dr. Martin Hämmerle, Dr. Zhiyong Wang, and Dr. Wei Huang, participated in the ISPRS Geospatial Week 2017 held in Wuhan, China. In the opening ceremony on Sept. 18, 2017, the U.V. Helava Award was presented to Dr.…

  • DFG Summer School “VGI”

    Last week, our colleagues Franz-Benjamin Mocnik and René Westerholt participated in a summer school of the DFG priority programme on “VGI”. GIScience Heidelberg is involved in that programme by two projects, one of which is dealing with data quality issues and another one that investigates the assessment of spatial assotiations in social media data. The…

  • Adding Landmark based Navigation Instructions to OpenRouteService

    A recently published paper (Rousell & Zipf 2017) presents a prototype navigation service extending OpenRouteService (Schmitz et al. 2008) that extracts landmarks suitable for pedestrian navigation instructions from the OSM dataset based on several metrics. In general, when providing instructions on how to get somewhere, people generally include landmarks in their instructions – “Turn left…

  • Reducing stress by avoiding noise with ‘Quiet Routing’ in OpenRouteService

    Noise pollution is a growing problem in many urban environments, affecting citizens’ daily life. It can reduce citizens’ happiness, increase their stress, and even people them get sick if they are exposed to noise pollution for a long period of time. In recent studies we investigate the use of crowdsourced data to derive noise polluted…

  • Introducing Healthy Routing preferring Green Areas with OpenRouteService

    Research in psychology and public health shows that there are environmental factors that cause an area to impose more or less stress to a person. One example is that being surrounded by natural green areas (meadows, parks, trees and forests etc. or also blue water areas) has a relaxing influence to the mood of a…

  • Paper on OSMlanduse.org at AGIT

    The programme of the AGIT Symposium 2017 in Salzburg is online now and it includes a first paper about the work at GIScience Heidelberg on OSMlanduse.org. It will be presented 6 July in the afternoon at AGIT Salzburg. The talk is entitled “OSMLanduse Version 1” while the full titel of the paper is: Voß, J.,…

  • GIScience support for Crowdsourced Damage Assessment project at Stanford University

    In the aftermath of natural disasters an assessment of the impact and damage in the affected area is crucial to enable coordination of response and recovery. While the disaster preparedness and response activations by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in regard to infrastructure mapping have already proven great potential in various disaster events, due to a…

  • A graph-based strategy for matching points-of-interests from different VGI sources

    Several urban studies have been increasingly relying on spatial data provided by Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) sources. The matching of features across different VGI projects may serve to assess and improve the reliability and completeness of VGI data. In a recent study, we first provide a short discussion on the similarity measures often used for…