Category: Research

  • Usability of Flickr tags for land use/land cover attribution

    A new study has been published in the international open access journal Geo-spatial Information Science (GSIS, Taylor & Francis), that explores the land use/land cover (LULC) separability by the machine-generated and user-generated Flickr photo tags (i.e. the auto-tags and the user-tags, respectively), based on an authoritative LULC dataset for San Diego County in the United…

  • The potential of OSM for landuse, health and humanitarian applications

    Recently, Michael Schulz from GIScience Heidelberg gave a talk at the colloquium of Prof. Carl Baierkuhnlein at the University of Bayreuth. During his talk he presented the results on OpenStreetMap usage targeting humanitarian applications, healthy and green routing based on openrouteservice and ecological analysis or the global climate protection map. OSM is harnessed for an abundance…

  • SYSSIFOSS – Synthetic structural remote sensing data for improved forest inventory models

    Airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data provides reliable information on forest structure. Related forest inventory approaches recently evolved into operational tools. Today, further optimization of existing approaches is pursued to ensure high data quality of the inventory information and cost-efficiency over varied environmental and silvicultural conditions. Synthetic LiDAR data has been suggested as useful…

  • Spatial conceptual compliance analysis with the OpenStreetMap History Database (OSHDB)

    In a previous blog post we performed a conceptual compliance analysis between OSM data and several tagging-guidelines using the OSHDB API. The results were visualized in a line chart, comparing the different compliance ratio over several months. The following analysis focuses on a spatial representation of the conceptual compliance. It is conducted for the “iD-editor”…

  • How to become ohsome part 1: Visualizing the historical evolution of OSM buildings of your city

    This blog post is the start of a series of posts, which describe what you are able to do using the ohsome framework developed at the Heidelberg Institute of Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT). OpenStreetMap (OSM), the biggest open map of our world, offers not only the current state of the data, but the whole historical evolution…

  • Complex Networks 2018 Conference: Dimension as an Invariant of Street Networks

    F-B Mocnik participates in the Complex Networks 2018 conference, presenting work about the impact of space on network representations.  Street networks have been examined in respect to their structure.  F-B Mocnik has previously examined networks from various domains, thereby demonstrating that the polynomial volume law applies to many of them.  The presentation at the conference…

  • HOT Summit 2019 is coming to Heidelberg

    We are happy to hereby share latest information about the 5th HOT Summit- the annual gathering of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team community- which after great events in Washington, Brussels, Ottawa and Dar es Salaam, will next year come to the picturesque city of Heidelberg, September 19th and 20th. HOT Summit 2019 as well as the…

  • Recommendations for organising better mapping parties with the aim of improving OpenStreetMap and Wheelmap data completeness

    Nowadays, several research projects show interest in employing volunteered geographic information (VGI) to improve their systems through using up-to-date and detailed data. The European project CAP4Access was one of the successful examples of such international-wide research projects that aimed to improve the accessibility of people with restricted mobility using crowdsourced data. In this project, OpenStreetMap…

  • Conceptual compliance analysis with the OpenStreetMap History Database (OSHDB)

    Conceptual compliance measures to what degree contributors of volunteered geographic information (VGI) are using proposed tagging-standards. Here, we look into OpenStreetMap (OSM) as the most well-known example for VGI. In OSM the most important tagging guideline is defined by its wiki. In addtion, OSM editors like iD or JOSM provide presets (default options to adhere to tagging standards).…

  • Auto3Dscapes for 4D Beach Observation

    How does a sandy beach naturally restore after a storm event? Invaluable information on this process is provided by a highly temporal (hourly) time series of 3D point cloud data acquired over several months at the beach of Kijkduin (NL). The permanent LiDAR system is operated by a team of TU Delft researchers in the…

  • Announcement of an Open Research Position

    The GIScience Research Group of the Geographical Institute is delighted to announce an open position as a researcher in the project “Heterogeneity and Convergence in Shared Data Sources. The Importance of cognitive Coherence in Collective Decision Making”. Please find more information below. Announcement of an open position at the Geographical Institute at Heidelberg University/Heidelberg Academy of…

  • Kick-Off Waterproofing Data project in São Paulo, Brazil

    This month we kicked off our new project Waterproofing Data in São Paulo, Brazil together with partners from Warwick University and Brazilian stakeholders such as Cemaden (National Early Warning and Monitoring Centre for Natural Disasters / Centro Nacional de Monitoramento e Alertas de Desastres Naturais) or local Universities, City of São Paulo, Fundacao Getulio Varga etc. We…