Category: Research

  • Matching OpenStreetMap Road Networks with Authority Data – a Polygon-based Approach

    Matching road network is an essential step for data quality assessment by using reference data. Conventionally, road network from two data sets are matched by using line-based approach which checks the similarity of properties of line segments. In new method recently published in IJGIS, a polygon-based approach is proposed to match OpenStreetMap road network with…

  • Being a Polar Researcher

    Mid of October Inga Beck was invited by a local primary school to talk about her research and to give the students an impression about the work of a Polar Researcher. The entire school (around 200 children and 15 teachers) gathered in the assembly hall of the school and listened carefully to the presentation. Beside…

  • Statistical investigation of geo-tagged shipping information

    Inspection and analysis of geo-tagged shipping information could provide insights to the transformation of a variety of “global spaces” during times of rapid globalization. One of the famous resources of shipping data is a shipping newspaper called LLOYDS lists. The list contains weekly and later daily information on global shipping since the late seventeenth century…

  • New Collaboration on Crowdsouring for Forensic Disaster Analysis with KIT

    The aftermath of disasters – such as the recent Nepal earthquake – have shown that the general public can contribute to the response of a disaster event and moreover is able to organize and engage itself across national borders. Digital volunteerism is offering unique capabilities to bridge information gaps, particularly in crisis situations where infrastructure…

  • New DFG Project on Data Integration from Location Based Social Networks

    Recently a new project has been accepted to be funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). It deals with an agent-based and quality-aware integration of geo-social network data, thus investigating data integration as a collaborative negotiation process. Web-based social networks are now a significant social phenomenon. The user-generated data produced through them, including the location-based data,…

  • Talk ‘3D-Geoinformation aus Laserscanningdaten’ at workshop ‘The future courtroom’

    At Thursday, 22nd of October, the GIScience LiDAR Research Group (LRG) contributed to the workshop ‘The future courtroom‘ (website in German) with a talk introducing the analysis of 3D Geodata and the connections to forensic science. Martin Hämmerle presented a selection of LRG projects covering a wide range of applications and use cases, from crowd…

  • Exploring spatiotemporal and semantic clusters of Twitter data using unsupervised neural networks

    The investigation of human activity patterns from location-based social networks like Twitter is a promising example of how to infer relationships and latent information for the characterization of urban structures. While there is a growing research body performing spatial analysis on social media data, the high dimensionality, complexity and granularity of social media information still…

  • Merging volunteered and expert accessibility data

    On Tuesday 13 October, we have been more than happy to host volunteers of SAP in the course of the “SAP month of service” as our guests. They have supported us to merge volunteered data about accessibility from wheelmap.org and expert data about accessibility from Heidelberg Hürdenlos (a local accessibility platform). Heidelberg Hürdenlos contains more…

  • A Conceptual Quality Framework for Volunteered Geographic Information @ COSIT 2015 this Tuesday

    The Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT) is taking place this week in Santa Fe, USA. This Tuesday our paper on “A Conceptual Quality Framework for Volunteered Geographic Information” by Andrea Ballatore and Alexander Zipf is being presented there. It outlines new proxy measures to several facets of conceptual quality, including accuracy, granularity, completeness, consistency,…

  • Workshop bridging OSM community and Wheelchair Users

    Our EU project CAP4Access (MyAccessible.EU) has organized a first international expert workshop during the 5th International Congress on “Tourism for All” in Madrid on 23 September, 2015. The 5th International Congress on Tourism for All has been held in Madrid from September 23 to 25. The first CAP4Access international expert workshop was organized during this…

  • GIScience HD @ ISSDQ’15 in France

    CIScience Heidelberg members Dr. Tobias Törnros and Dr. Hongchao Fan attended the ISSDQ’15 (The 9th International Symposium on Spatial Data Quality) from 28 to 30 September 2015 in La Grande Motte, France. Tobias had an excellent talk about uncertainties of completeness measures in OpenStreetMap – A case study for buildings in a medium-sized German city.…

  • Twitter as an indicator for whereabouts of people? Correlating Twitter with UK census data

    Detailed knowledge regarding the whereabouts of people and their social activities in urban areas with high spatial and temporal resolution is still widely unexplored. Thus, the spatiotemporal analysis of Location Based Social Networks (LBSN) has great potential regarding the ability to sense spatial processes and to gain knowledge about urban dynamics, especially with respect to…