Category: Research

  • The future of OpenMapSurfers tiles

    OpenMapSurfer is the name of a web tile service based on OpenStreetMap data developed by Maxim Rylov and hosted by the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology. The map style is a general purpose “basemap” layer featuring some unique properties, such as high cartographic quality label placement, see floor bathymetry, and a pleasant warm color scheme.…

  • Teaching geodata acquisition in and around Heidelberg

    As part of the lecture “Geodatenerfassung”, geography students in their first semester turned theory of digital geodata acquisition into practice. Based on their aims and requirements, the students acquired geodata with different methods and sensors. Using a high-end Riegl VZ-2000i terrestrial laser scanner, two groups captured the old town of Heidelberg and a limestone quarry…

  • Visualizing 3D Spatial Data with GigaMesh – Tutorial Videos

    A series of video tutorials of GigaMesh has recently become available on YouTube. GigaMesh is a software framework for displaying, processing and visualizing large meshes of 3D spatial data representing 2D surfaces. The most recent tutorial by Paul Bayer and Hubert Mara presents a rapid method of hillshading for a geospatial dataset. The video shows…

  • Call for Abstracts for PhD Colloquium on Deep Learning in Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Geospatial Information Processing

    Call for Abstracts: 4th PhD Colloquium on “Deep Learning in Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Geospatial Information Processing” May 15-16, 2019 in Rostock The Division on Geoinformatics (Abteilung Geoinformatik) of the German Geodetic Commission (Deutsche Geodätische Kommission, DGK) and the Working Group on Geoinformatics (Arbeitskreis Geoinformatik) of the German Society for Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Geoinformation…

  • How to become ohsome part 2: Comparing different regions based on their attributive completeness of OSM data

    Welcome back to the second part of the blog series how to become ohsome. If you have not read the first part yet, better go and check it out now. It explains how you can create an ohsome visualization of the historical development of the OSM data from a city of your choice. This second part shows how to…

  • STAP19 Compact Course and Workshop in April – Registration Open

    From 01-04 April 2019, the 3DGeo and FCGL research groups are organizing a compact course and workshop on Spatial and Temporal Analysis of Geographic Phenomena (STAP19) at the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR, Heidelberg University). The course will teach participants state-of-the-art methods of 3D spatial data processing and analysis with a focus on spatial…

  • Blindspots in ecosystem service research

    Ecosystem service research is high on the policy agenda. Strategies to synthesize individual success stories and derive generalized results to provide guidance for policymakers and stakeholder is central to many science-policy initiatives, such as IPBES, ELD, WAVES and TEEB. However, to successfully transfer knowledge from ES case studies to environmental policies, it is necessary to…

  • Impacts of conservation agriculture on services provided by Mediterranean agro-ecosystems

    Agricultural production in the Mediterranean region is challenged by both climate change and socio-economic factors that might lead to accelerated land degradation and severe loss of ecosystem services. Climate change is likely to lead to increasing water stress in the region leading to drought related loss of agricultural production and severe damage to natural and…

  • 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”…