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GIScience Blog

Category: Research

  • 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”…

  • 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…