Category: Research

  • OSM Changeset Analysis with Humstats and the ohsome Framework

    In this blog post we want to take a closer look at a fruitful mapping collaboration between humanitarian organizations and corporations. Since 2015 mapping remote areas in OSM  is one part in the cooperation between the leading savings, retirement and insurance company, Aviva, and the British Red Cross (BRC). By combining multiple datasets we analyzed…

  • OSM data quality analysis for different stages of the mapping process

    Slums are an important operational area for humanitarian organisations: Because of provisional housing, poor sanitation and difficult socio-political circumstances offers of help from such organisations are important and often necessary. For such deployments, humanitarian actors rely heavily on Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), as official maps and data are often incomplete. This makes it all the…

  • Monitoring OSM and Tasking Manager to Map 1 Billion

    In 2020, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) received funding from seven donors through TED’s Audacious Project. This has accelerated HOT’s ambition to map an area home to one billion people. HOT is working to add places at high risk of natural disaster or experiencing poverty to OpenStreetMap by significantly scaling-up support for local mapping communities.…

  • Measuring the tallest sequoias of Germany in student field campaign

    Last Fieldwork Friday, a group of students gathered in Arboretum I to capture Heidelberg’s sequoia trees in the frame of a 3D Sensor Practical. In small groups, the students learned surveying strategies via terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) measurements. It was one of the first joint field campaigns of our…

  • GIScience and HeiGIT contributions to AGILE 2021 conference

    The AGILE 2021 conference is taking place this week. It is the the 24rd AGILE conference on GIScience. AGILE is the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe and the 2021 conference is for the first time held as a virtual conference. As in earlier years GIScience Heidelberg and HeiGIT are contributing to the conference with several…

  • Methods and algorithms for 3D/4D change analysis and virtual laser scanning

    Curious, which methods on 3D/4D point cloud-based change analysis and virtual laser scanning we are working on, that might also be interesting for your research? Thanks to a redesign of our 3DGeo website you can now quickly get an overview of algorithms and methods, that are acitvely developed in our research and featured in recent…

  • Automatic building detection with ohsome2label and Tensorflow

    Accurate and complete geographic data of human settlement is crucial for humanitarian aid and disaster response. OpenStreetMap (OSM) can serve as a valuable source, especially for global south countries where buildings are largely unmapped. In a previous blog, we introduced our recent work in detecting OpenStreetMap missing buildings, so this time we will show you…

  • The ohsome quality analyst goes public on Github with new release 0.3.0

    The ohsome quality analyst (short: OQT) has been introduced at the beginning of this year and today we are proud to announce two updates. First, we  released the new version 0.3.0 which includes new OSM layers and a brand new data quality report. Working on this release has been the first collaboration with MapAction under…

  • All countries of Central and South America now on Open Healthcare Access Map

    After Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia we have now published all countries of Central and South America on the Open Healthcare Access Map. The web application is available here: https://apps.heigit.org/healthcare_access/. Please note that this is still a prototype and feedback on improvements and desired functionalities is very welcome. You can reach us at…

  • ohsomeHeX provides access to OSM feature history

    Did you ever wonder how your city was mapped over time, how geometries were changed and refined, how mistakes were added and corrected again? Then read on: ohsomeHex has a great new feature for you – the individual object’s zoom-in-history-view. To continue in providing valuable insights into the quality and development process of OpenStreetMap data, we…

  • Detecting OpenStreetMap missing buildings by transferring pre-trained deep neural networks

    Recently, a new research paper “Detecting OpenStreetMap missing buildings by transferring pre-trained deep neural networks” (Pisl, J., Li, H., Herfort, B., Lautenbach, S., Zipf, A. 2021) has been accepted at the the 24th AGILE conference 2021. The conference will take place virually on June 8 to 11, 2021. Accurate and complete geographic data of human…

  • The impact of recent gully filling practices on wheat yield at the Campiña landscape in Southern Spain

    The significance of gully filling practices on agricultural production has been only rarely evaluated in literature. In this study, a medium-sized catchment was selected, for being representative of the conventional farming practices on annual crops in the Campiña landscape in Southern Spain. During two wheat campaigns, an analysis of the spatial and temporal evolution of…