Category: OSM

  • Report on the 27th International Cartographic Conference; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    The 27th International Cartographic Conference (ICC) was held from 23-28th of August in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The conference brought together several hundreds of professors, researchers and students worldwide in three main disciplines of Cartography, GIScience, and Remote Sensing to discuss various research topics ranging from map design, map use, users and usabilities to location…

  • Recent Progress in Automated Cartography at German Cartographers Day at INTERGEO

    The German Cartographers Day (Deutscher Kartographentag) is taking place at INTERGEO conference held in Stuttgart this week. We will present an update on recent progress in automated cartography in a talk by Andreas Reimer and Maxim Rylov about our latest improvements in automated label placement, which have been implemented in MapSurfer.NET as published as in OpenMapSurfer.uni-hd.de.…

  • Quality Evaluation of OSM with Authoritative Data — a study of Land Use in Southern Germany

    Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) such as data derived from the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project is a popular data source for freely available geographic data. There is frequently a cause of concern regarding the quality and usability of such data. In addition to our former studies (further here) or complementing our OSM in GIScience Book in a…

  • IJGIS Review for OpenStreetMap in GIScience Book

    The International Journal of Geographical Information Science (IJGIS) published a first review by Wen Lin at Taylor & Francis Online (DOI: 10.1080/13658816.2015.1077965) about our Springer book on OpenStreetMap in GIScience: experiences, research and applications, edited by Jamal Jokar Arsanjani, Alexander Zipf, Peter Mooney and Marco Helbich (2015, Springer Series: Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography,…

  • Matching GPS trajectories to street segments – an open source implementation

    We would like to inform about a new open source tool that allows matching of GPS trajectories to corresponding street segments. The tool implements a simplified version of the algorithm presented by Zhang et al. (2010). It is a JAVA based implementation and has been put under LGPL license. You can access the source code…

  • GIScience @AGIT/GI Forum conference 2015

    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 Manfred Hauswirth from TU Berlin talking about the impact of Linked Data, the Internet of Things, and Clouds for Geospatial Information Systems, further keynotes and conference talks…

  • OpenRouteService at the Heidelberg wheelchair marathon

    On last Saturday we braved the tropical heat and used the occasion of the 13th international wheelchair marathon in Heidelberg to inform the public about our recent developments regarding wheelchair accessible route planning with OpenRouteService. We are thankful for the interesting conversations with people from Germany, Denmark, Japan, England and France and for their valuable…

  • Extracting raw GPS data from OpenStreetMap – an LGPL tool

    We are happy to announce that a new JAVA-based tool is available that allows extracting raw GPS data from the OpenStreetMap GPS planet file. The tool is under LGPL license. It allows to specify a bounding box and to export the extracted data to 3D-Shapefiles. Besides the full GPS planet file there are also regional…

  • A Conceptual Quality Framework for Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI)

    The assessment of the quality of volunteered geographic information (VGI) is cornerstone to understand the fitness for purpose of VGI in many application domains. Most analyses focus on the geometric and positional quality, and only sporadic attention has been devoted to the interpretation of the data, i.e., the communication process through which consumers try to…

  • AGILE 2015 conference (and third place poster award)

    Last week saw the 18th AGILE conference being held in Lisbon, Portugal. Starting on Tuesday with a number of parallel workshops, the conference ran until Friday and included a number of interesting talks, key note sessions and a number of social events. The presence of GIScience at Heidelberg University was felt through two workshops being…

  • Teaching and research in Santiago de Chile / Docencia e investigación en Santiago de Chile

    During the first half of May 2015, Bernhard Höfle and his NEOHAZ team members Carolin Klonner, Sabrina Marx and Tomás Usón were teaching at the Heidelberg Center for Latin America (HCLA) in Santiago de Chile as well as conducting research for the NEOHAZ project related to urban flood risk management. The project aims at analysing…

  • The importance of sidewalk information in OpenStreetMap for routing and navigation of people with restricted mobility

    Since the launch of OpenStreetMap (OSM) project in 2004, due to its nature and objective in collecting data from volunteers which are not necessarily familiar with GIScience and data collection procedures, the quality of gathered information has always been a main concern for both research and industrial communities. Several research studies have been conducted to…