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GIScience Blog

Category: OSM

  • 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…

  • Nepal Disaster Mapping Heidelberg University

    Following the earthquake which struck Nepal on April 25 hundreds of volunteers worldwide come together to map out disaster affected areas through the coordination of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) and the local partner in Kathmandu, the Kathmandu Living Labs team. Disastermappers Heidelberg joined the efforts on monday evening by organizing a first mapping event.…

  • Mapping for wheelchair users at Heidelberg castle gardens

    On the occasion of the European protest day for equal rights of people with disabilities the Heidelberg advisory board of people with disabilities organises an event at Heidelberg castle tomorrow (30/4) from 2pm to 5pm. Our local CAP4ACCESS team is happy to join this event by leading mapping efforts to fill some data gaps in…

  • Disaster OpenRouteService for Nepal

    Facing the most severe earthquake for the past decades, Nepal and especially the Kathmandu area show unimagineable devastations. In order to provide emergency and rescue forces with near real time information concerning infrastructural conditions of roads and buildings the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (H.O.T.) as part of the OpenStreetMap Community coordinates the crisis mapping activities for…

  • Option for wheelchair routing now available within OpenRouteService

    We are happy to announce that the first version of the wheelchair routing profile is now available online within OpenRouteService and goes into beta testing phase. Currently, there is a separate version (http://openrouteservice.org/wheelchair-2.1/) for testing that contains this new feature, which currently covers Germany only. However, after beta testing, it will also be available via…

  • How to combine OpenStreetMap and Airborne Laser Scanning data for updating Digital Elevation Models?

    The answer can be found in our most recent paper “Updating Digital Elevation Models via Change Detection and Fusion of Human and Remote Sensor Data in Urban Environments” that has just been finally released in the International Journal of Digital Earth. You can find a preprint version of the article freely accessible here: http://koenigstuhl.geog.uni-heidelberg.de/publications/2015/Hoefle/Klonner_et_al_2015_preprint.pdf Citation…

  • Deriving sidewalk information using citizen science becomes #ProjectOfTheWeek

    We are happy to report that our task designed for the citizen science platform crowdcrafting.org was selected as their #ProjectOfTheWeek. This will help us to finish our experiment to derive information about sidewalks using Mapillary street level imagery with the support of the crowd very soon. Sidewalk information is an important resource for accessible route…