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GIScience Blog

Category: Research

  • Call For Participation for Crowdsourced Damage Assessment Project

    In the aftermath of a disaster, knowing the condition of buildings, infrastructure, and utilities is critical to both immediate response and long-term recovery efforts. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is often asked to help identify damage to buildings and other assets in the affected region. In the past, limitations in post-disaster imagery and difficulties in…

  • MapSwipe Analytics: Map each Swipe and Tap

    Since the launch of the MapSwipe Analytics webpage three month ago we were able to improve our service and offer more detailed information on each project in MapSwipe. MapSwipe is a mobile App for crowdsourcing geographic information needed by humanitarian organisations like Red Cross and Doctors without Borders (MSF) introduced earlier. In particular the data can be used for priorizing areas…

  • Paper on OSMlanduse.org at AGIT

    The programme of the AGIT Symposium 2017 in Salzburg is online now and it includes a first paper about the work at GIScience Heidelberg on OSMlanduse.org. It will be presented 6 July in the afternoon at AGIT Salzburg. The talk is entitled “OSMLanduse Version 1” while the full titel of the paper is: Voß, J.,…

  • Monitoring and Assessing Post-Disaster Tourism Recovery Using Geotagged Social Media Data

    Tourism is a economically highly important industry. It is, however, vulnerable to disaster events. Geotagged social media data, as one of the forms of volunteered geographic information (VGI), has been widely explored to support the prevention, preparation, and response phases of disaster management, while little effort has been put on the recovery phase. A recently…

  • GIScience support for Crowdsourced Damage Assessment project at Stanford University

    In the aftermath of natural disasters an assessment of the impact and damage in the affected area is crucial to enable coordination of response and recovery. While the disaster preparedness and response activations by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in regard to infrastructure mapping have already proven great potential in various disaster events, due to a…

  • Wisdom of the Crowd from LBSN: PhD Defence of Ming Li

    Last Thursday our GIScience HD team member Ming Li successfully defended her PhD. The thesis is entitled “Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd from Location-based Social Networks: Theoretical Potentials and Practical Applications”. Thanks to the technical advancements, the mobile users all over the world are collaborating in the location-based social networks (LBSNs) to create a…

  • Workshop on “spatial urban analytics with user-generated geodata”

    We’ve recently finalised the programme of a workshop on “spatial urban analytics with user-generated geographic information”. The event is conjoined with the 2017 International Conference at the Royal Geographical Society in London and is co-chaired by René Westerholt (GIScience Heidelberg). We received methodological as well as empirical contributions, which reflects the breadth of the complex…

  • Follow-up 3D-TAIGER meeting at National Cheng Kung University in Tainan

    Within the exchange and collaboration project 3D-TAIGER (Multi-Source 3D Geoinformation Extraction for Improved Management of Forest and Natural Hazards – Collaboration between TAIwan and GERmany), a further workshop took place in Tainan from Thursday, 06 April 2017 to Monday, 10 April 2017. Hosted by the National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) in Tainan, the schedule comprised…

  • DeepVGI at WWW2017 Perth

    Our group member Jiaoyan Chen attended the 26th World Wide Web Conference from 3 April to 7 April in Perth, Australia. The topic of the conference includes web-related machine learning, social network, knowledge base, crowdsourcing, urban data mining, etc. He gave a 30-minues presentation in the co-conference Big 2017 as well as a poster presentation…

  • Talk at AAG Meeting in Boston

    On Friday, our member René Westerholt held a talk at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in Boston. The talk which is entitled “Topological and scale-related issues in Twitter analyses through superimposed forms of spatial heterogeneity” was part of a special session on geographic data science organised by Alex Singleton from…

  • Seminar on “Spatial urban analytics” at Harvard

    Our team member René Westerholt recently held a joint session with Dr Guibo Sun from Hong Kong University. The session on “spatial urban analytics” was part of the Geography colloquium at Harvard University. Both talks were dealing with methodological issues. Thereby, René emphasised on technical issues in the spatial analysis of social media data. Dr…

  • Utilizing crowdsourced data for studies of cycling and air pollution

    Recently, Strava, a popular website and mobile app dedicated to tracking athletic activity (cycling and running), began offering a data service called Strava Metro, designed to help transportation researchers and urban planners to improve infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians. Strava Metro data has the potential to promote studies of cycling and health by indicating where…