Category: Research

  • New ‘Transformations to Sustainability’ project “Waterproofing Data” with UK and Brazil

    Recently a project proposal to the Belmont Forum and NORFACE joint programme Transformations to Sustainability (T2S) call has been accepted. The project “Waterproofing Data” investigates the governance of water-related risks, with a focus on social and cultural aspects of data practices. Typically, data flows up from local levels to scientific “centres of expertise”, and then flood-related…

  • Towards the statistical analysis and visualization of places

    The concept of place recently gains momentum in GIScience. In some fields like human geography, spatial cognition or information theory, this topic already has a longer scholarly tradition. This is however not yet completely the case with statistical spatial analysis and cartography. Despite that, taking full advantage of the plethora of user-generated information that we…

  • Perspective Article: Volunteered Geographic Information for Disaster Risk Reduction

    Over the past few years, the Missing Maps approach has repeatedly proved its potential for humanitarian assistance and disaster management. While the project was launched by only four organizations, there are now 17 member organizations in Missing Maps, and nearly 60,000 mappers. The Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement have recognized the potential of the…

  • Live from the Ötztal Alps (#5): Exploring high-mountain 3D GIScience

    On our last day in the Ötztal Alps, we had an exciting excursion from Obergurgl to Ramolhaus on 3006 m a.s.l. On our way up we could directly explore glacial history by passing the historical extents and related moraines of the retreating Gurgler glacier. The students also learned about geoarcheology and settlement history in the…

  • Live from the Ötztal Alps (#4): Exploring high-mountain 3D GIScience

    We are blogging live from Ramolhaus at 3006 m a.s.l. After a 4-hours hiking tour with 1100 height meters we are now enjoying the impressive view over glaciers with “Kaiserschmarren” for lunch.

  • Openrouteservice Developers Dashboard Revamped

    Over the past few months the openrouteservice team has worked on a new developers dashboard in order to make the registration and usage of the API more easy and accessible. Now the developers using the openrouteservice API will experience a more intuitive, responsive interface and with a more polished better look and feel to view…

  • Live from the Ötztal Alps (#3): Exploring high mountain 3D geoinformation

    On the last day of fieldwork in the rotmoos valley two groups (terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and photogrammetry) set off to the rotmoos glacier again. A second TLS dataset was aqcuired which enables the students to perform a change detection or deformation analysis. The electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) group futher explored the pre-Quaternary relief in…

  • Live from the Ötztal Alps (#2): Exploring high mountain 3D geoinformation

    Today was the second day of field work in the Rotmoos valley in the Ötztal Alps for our 16 students. The hot sun challenged the data acquisition but the impressive landscape makes up for every effort. The terrestrial laser scanning group climbed up the valley flanks to acquire a high resolution point cloud from an…

  • New Jupyter Notebook: Analysis of Access to Health Care using OpenRouteService Isochrones API

    We published a new jupyter notebook which depicts how to use the OpenRouteService Isochrones API to analyse health care acessibility in Madagascar. In the case of a disaster (natural or man made), a country is not only affected by the intensity of the disaster but also by it’s own vulnerability to it. Countries have different…

  • Live from the Ötztal Alps (#1): Exploring high mountain 3D geoinformation

    As part of the practical field training “3D Geodatenerfassung im Hochgebirge (Ötztal)”, 29 July – 04 August, 16 students explore pyhsical geography in an impressive high-mountain environment in the Ötztal valley, Austria. With the help of terrestrial LiDAR, RTK GNSS, close range photogrammetry and electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), multi-source datasets will be captured for the…

  • Meet us at State of the Map 2018 Milan: Ohsome talks and workshop ahead!

    In a few days – THIS Saturday July, 29. – the State of the Map 2018 Conference in Milan will opening its doors with many interesting talks and workshops related to OpenStreetMap. HeiGIT and the GIScience Research Group at Heidelberg University will be there with several persons and give the following presentations and even a…

  • 3D WebGIS: From Visualization to Analysis. An Efficient Browser-Based 3D Line-of-Sight Analysis

    3D WebGIS systems have been mentioned in the literature almost since the beginning of the graphical web era in the late 1990s. The potential use of 3D WebGIS is linked to a wide range of scientific and application domains, such as planning, controlling, tracking or simulation in crisis management, military mission planning, urban information systems,…