Category: Research

  • Colloquium on Change Analysis of Hypertemporal Terrestrial Laser Scanning Point Clouds

    We cordially invite everybody interested to our next open GIScience colloquium talk The speaker is Evelyn Schmitz Master student, FARO Europe GmbH & Co. KG, Korntal-Münchingen When: Monday 30.04.2018, 2:15 pm Where: INF 348, room 015 (Institute of Geography, Heidelberg University) Voxel-based change analysis of hypertemporal terrestrial laser scanning point clouds of the research campus ARENA2036 including…

  • The Ohsome API: dynamic OSM statistics for real-world applications

    The Ohsome API, developed at HeiGIT, is part of the ohsome OSM history analytics platform (and yes, it is pronounced like the word “awesome” 😉.  It serves as the connection between the OpenStreetMap History Database (OSHDB) and possible frontends, such as the Ohsome Nepal Dashboard prototype. The communication with the Ohsome API works via HTTP GET and POST requests as…

  • 4D-LiDAR Snow Cover Monitoring at the Highest Summit of Germany

    The all-new terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) of the 3DGeo group (Prof. Bernhard Höfle) has been set up at the Environmental Research Station Schneefernerhaus over one week (mid of April 2018) to capture a unique highly temporal time series of the melting and degrading snow cover during the April’s week with the warmest daily maximum temperatures…

  • First prize of the GISRUK data challenge

    A team around Prof. Joao Porto de Albuquerque, including our GIScience Heidelberg colleague René Westerholt, has won this years GISRUK data challenge. Big Congratulations! The theme of the data challenge was to find novel and explicitly spatial insights on the Brexit. Our contribution relates the recent influx of foreign people to the Brexit voting outcomes.…

  • Upcoming Ohsome Conferences

    The Ohsome OSM history analytics platform, developed at HeiGIT, will be presented at the following conferences: ISCRAM in Rochester, NY, USA (20th – 23rd of May) In the short paper for the International Conference for Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management we illustrate the specific potential of the ohsome platform for disaster activations by means of two…

  • International PhD Defenses in 3DGeo Research

    We would like to congratulate Dr. Milutin Milenkovic (Vienna Univ. of Technology, AT) and Dr. Xi Zhu (ITC, NL) for achieving their PhD degree in the domain of 3DGeo research utilizing point clouds from LiDAR and photogrammetry. Bernhard Höfle joined the defenses of the two very good PhD studies: Xi Zhu (2018): Forest Leaf Water…

  • A brief intro to the OpenStreetMap History Database (OSHDB) API

    The OpenStreetMap History Database (OSHDB) is the main data backend developed at HeiGIT for the ohsome OSM history analytics platform, that will make OSM’s history data more accessible for further analysis. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a rich resource of freely available geographic information. However, the possibilities for analyzing OSM data on a global scale are limited because of…

  • Open – POI – Service Helps You Find Points of Interest!

    Once again we are extremely excited to announce a new open source project we have been working on over the past few months. To honor the name, we have coined it openpoiservice and it has the simple task of finding points of interest for a given geometry! To this end, it is able to return…

  • Keynote at GISRUK Conference 2018, Leicester

    Prof. Dr. Alexander Zipf is a invited keynote speaker at the 26th annual GIScience Research UK conference (GISRUK) will be held at the University of Leicester on 17-20 April 2018. On Thursday April 18th he will give a talk on “Operationalising Volunteered Geographic Information – From Analytics to Improvement and Application“. Much research has been…

  • Let’s meet at SOTM 2018 :: Paper on OSM History Analytics Accepted in Academic Track

    A paper for the Academic Track of the State of the Map Conference, Milan, has been accepted. We are looking forward to discuss with you following aspects: A growing number of studies analyzes OSM data, its contributors, usage, and quality. Such studies were mostly limited to analyzing either small samples of the OSM database or…

  • Towards Using the Potential of OpenStreetMap History for Disaster Activation Monitoring

    Over the last years, the growing OpenStreetMap (OSM) database repeatedly proved its potential for various use cases, including disaster management. Disaster mapping activations show increasing contributions, but oftentimes raise questions related to the quality of the provided Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). In order to better monitor and understand OSM mapping and data quality, HeiGIT developed…

  • Graph-based matching of points-of-interest from collaborative geo-datasets

    Several geospatial applications require comprehensive semantic information from points-of-interest (POIs). However, this information is frequently dispersed across different collaborative mapping platforms. Surprisingly, there is still a research gap on the conflation of POIs from this type of geo-dataset. In a recent paper by Novack et al. (2018), we focus on the matching aspect of POI…