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GIScience Blog

Category: OSM

  • Visualising GPS data from OpenStreetMap using WebGL

    GPS data uploaded to the OpenStreetMap servers is a popular example of what is called Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). The data has been (and is still) collected by the project contributors primarily to support mapping. As the inclusion of roads and paths in the map is a major goal of the project, the collected GPS…

  • Modeling the evolution of OpenStreetMap with Cellular Automata using a new VGI Contribution Index

    Major research efforts have so far dealt with OSM data quality analysis, but the modality of the evolution of OpenStreetMap (OSM) across space and time has been barely noted. Therefore, a new study by Jokar Arsanjani et al. that has recently been accepted for publication in Transactions in GIS aims to analyze spatio-temporal patterns of…

  • OpenStreetMap and Mapsurfer.NET help to search for missing people

    We know many examples when VGI data (e.g., OpenStreetMap, Wikimapia, etc.) help to cope with effects of various humanitarian disasters all over the world. The reason of using open crowd-sourced data is clear. The geographic data are available for free. If, for some reason, data are missing for a specific region, it is not a…

  • GIScience group covered by Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung

    Our #mapforaccess mapping party has been covered in yesterdays issue of the local newspaper Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung (~80,000 copies per day in the Rhine-Neckar region). Enjoy reading! (Click to enlarge) Online version here.

  • Report on CAP4Access meeting in Elche, Spain

    The 3rd official meeting for CAP4Access project took place in the beautiful city of Elche in Spain during 28 to 30th of October 2014. The morning of the first day was spent in a press conference at the municipality of Elche where the mayor of the city gave a talk regarding the importance of this…

  • An assessment of a collaborative mapping approach for exploring land use patterns for several European metropolises

    A new research paper entitled “An assessment of a collaborative mapping approach for exploring land use patterns for several European metropolises” has been published in International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation. Abstract: Until recently, land surveys and digital interpretation of remotely sensed imagery have been used to generate land use inventories. These techniques however,…

  • A practical algorithm for labelling areal features outside their boundaries

    One of the subtasks of automated map labelling that has received little attention so far is the labelling of areas. Geographic areas often are represented by concave polygons which pose severe limitations on straightforward solutions due to their great variety of shape, a fact worsened by the lack of measures for quantifying feature-label relationships. In…

  • Summary of CAP4Access workshop in Heidelberg

    On the 12th and 13th of August 2014, the Smart Simulation Group led by Dr. Mohamed Bakillah of the GIScience Research Group at Heidelberg University organized and hosted an internal workshop for the CAP4Access project partners. The aim of this workshop was to present and discuss the activities, sharing of tasks, ongoing progress and issues…

  • Field experiment: a low-cost approach for deriving pedestrian sidewalk network data

    As a task for CAP4Access project, on Monday 11th of August, members of the Smart Simulation group (Mohamed Bakillah, Amin Mobasheri and Sarah Labusga) of GIScience at Heidelberg University performed a field experiment together with people with limited mobilities. Several GPS trackers (with different characteristics and predefined parameters for data collection) were installed on three wheelchairs and for a selected…

  • The Chilean newspaper El Mercurio reports about our VGI research

    The Chilean newspaper El Mercurio has released an article about Heidelberg’s research on VGI and Neogeography in their Science and Technology section in the issue of 14 July 2014. El Mercurio, Santiago de Chile (No. 41.265), p. A11: Neogeografía: La geografía evoluciona al alero de las redes sociales.

  • Lettering Maps by considering Basemap Detail

    If you followed our previous posts (#1, #2) concerning high quality cartographic label placement, then this post is worthy of notice. Topographic maps are arguably one of the most information-dense, yet intuitively usable, graphical artifacts produced by mankind. Cartography as science and practice has developed and collected a wealth of design principles and techniques to…

  • GIScience Heidelberg @ Santiago de Chile

    The Heidelberg Center for Latin America (HCLA) in Santiago de Chile offers a Master of Science in Governance of Risk and Resources. This cooperative venture between the Geography institutes of Heidelberg University, the Universidad Catolica de Chile and the Universidad de Chile focuses on the (political and economic) controllability of problem-driven interaction between humans and…