Category: Research

  • 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…

  • Third Workshop on “3D Field Methods in Geosciences”

    The third workshop on 3D methods in geological applications was jointly organized by the University of Göttingen, the Geological Service of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW, German federal state), and the 3D Geo Research Group at Heidelberg University. The workshop is an event of the initiative “3D Field Methods in Geosciences”, which provides a platform to connect…

  • POI/ROI Discovery using Flickr geotagged photos

    In the era of big data, ubiquitous Flickr geotagged photos have opened a considerable opportunity for discovering valuable geographic information. Point of interest (POI) and region of interest (ROI) are significant reference data that are widely used in geospatial applications. A recently published study (Kuo et al 2018) study aims to develop an efficient method…

  • Contribution selected for final round of GISRUK data challenge

    The results of an analysis of migration data and of the Brexit referendum votes are among only four selected finalists of this year’s data challenge associated with the GISRUK conference. The research was conducted by a team advised by Professor João Porto de Albququerque (University of Warwick) including our colleague René Westerholt. The idea of…

  • Preview of the ohsome Nepal dashboard

    The ohsome OpenStreetMap history analytics platform, which is currently developed at HeiGIT, will make OSM’s full-history data more easily accessible. We are pleased to announce that we are coming closer to reaching our objectives, hereby sharing a preview of the first ohsome web dashboard. Our dashboards will allow you to explore OSM full-history data using…