Category: Research

OpenRouteService Update 3.1 – with Surface Information and more!

In our latest release we have primarily focused on optimising and stabilising the backend and on adding new elements to provide an improved user experience throughout the OpenRouteService 3.1. We improved the visualisation of real-time traffic information for the route instructions as they now appear as number of warnings within the route summary (currently for Germany…

2016-04-11
OpenRouteService featured in MENSCHEN. das magazin.

Among other great apps OpenRouteService and the corresponding Navigation App developed in our group have been mentioned in the germanwide magazine “MENSCHEN. das magazin.” (~30k copies). The current issue has a special focus on accessibility, where particularly the wheelchair profile of ORS that is currently under development in the scope of the CAP4Access project fits…

2016-04-06
GIScience HD contributes to Crisis Mapping Workshop for the “Natural Risk in a Changing World“ Spring School at Potsdam University

Last Friday, 18th March, Carolin Klonner and Melanie Eckle of the GIScience Research Group were invited to give a workshop on “Crisis Mapping with OpenStreetMap” in scope of the DFG Graduate School “Natural Risk in a Changing World” Spring School at the University of Potsdam. The PhD candidates were introduced to current research and practices…

2016-03-22
Autonomously Operating Low-Cost Static Terrestrial LiDAR

In order to optimize agricultural processes, near real-time spatial information about in-field variations, such as crop height development (i.e., changes over time), is indispensable. This development can be captured with a LiDAR system. However, its applicability in precision agriculture is often hindered due to high costs and unstandardized processing methods. In our new study we…

2016-03-07
Amateur or Professional: Assessing the Expertise of Major Contributors in OpenStreetMap Based on Contributing Behaviors

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) projects, such as OpenStreetMap (OSM), provide an alternative way to produce geographic data. Research has showed that the resulting data in some areas are of decent quality, which guarantees their usability in various applications. Though these achievements are normally attributed to the huge heterogeneous community mainly consisting of amateurs, it is…

2016-02-25
Evaluation of EU project on Improving Accessibility with OpenStreetMap

The second year evaluation meeting of CAP4Access project took place on February 17th, 2016 at European Commission in Brussels. Representatives of all project partners presented the results and work-in-progress of their tasks for the second year of the project, followed by questions from two external reviewers appointed by the European Commission. From CAP4Access team at GIScience…

2016-02-22
Better Maps for the Weather Portal Kachelmannwetter

The goal of our new project with Kachelmannwetter.com is to provide specialized maps based on OpenStreetMap data using the cartographic framework MapSurfer.NET which currently serves the map service at uni-heidelberg.de/openmapsurfer. To achieve the project goals, we will design a brand new map style and add several extensions to the framework. Stay tuned for the result!

2016-02-17
HeiMAP – a virtual research platform for historic maps in the humanities

Recently a new project “HeiMAP” has been funded at Heidelberg University. The goal of HeiMAP is the development of an online research platform with modular tools and services for project and data management especially for the collaborative work with and on predominantly historical maps and geographic information in the humanities. Maps contain multiple layers of…

2016-02-16
Enrico Steiger defends PhD on Explorative Spatial & Temporal Human Mobility Analysis from User-Generated Data

today Enrico Steiger successfully defended his PhD thesis about “Explorative Spatial and Temporal Human Mobility Analysis from User-Generated Data” at GIScience Heidelberg University. The massive amount of pervasive, user-generated data creates new possibilities to discover and utilize geographic information. Tied in with this novel role of actively participating users, is a growing research challenge where…

2016-02-05
New HORIZON 2020 project “WeGovNow” – Towards We-Government: Collective and participative approaches for addressing local policy challenges

Recently a new 3 year EU project in the HORIZON 2020 programme has been accepted and is about to start now. WeGovNow is aiming at using state-of-the-art digital technologies in community engagement platforms to engage citizens in decision making processes within their local neighbourhood. It aims at bringing together multiple citizen-driven systems into a single…

2016-02-03
Temporal Analysis on Contribution Inequality in OpenStreetMap: A Comparative Study for Four Countries

Contribution inequality widely exists in OpenStreetMap (OSM), which means that most data come from a minority of the contributors, while the majority only accounts for a small percentage of data. This phenomenon is of great importance to understanding from where the data come and how the project evolves. The investigation in a recently published paper…

2016-01-19
New Open-Source 3D WebGIS API GIScene.js released

Easily visualize your 3D data on the web using up-to-date web technologies without additional plug-ins. The GIScene.js framework is easy to use and extendable. Based on the famous Three.js API, it introduces GIS concepts like Layers, Controls, Coordinates, Projections and more. If you are familiar with the web mapping library OpenLayers you will find this…

2016-01-12