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GIScience Blog

Category: Research

  • Combining Social Media and Authoritative Data towards identifying useful Information for Disaster Management

    A Study on the Twitter usage in the River Elbe Flood of June 2013 In recent years, social media emerged as a potential resource to improve the management of crisis situations such as disasters triggered by natural hazards. Although there is a growing research body concerned with the analysis of the usage of social media…

  • The importance of sidewalk information in OpenStreetMap for routing and navigation of people with restricted mobility

    Since the launch of OpenStreetMap (OSM) project in 2004, due to its nature and objective in collecting data from volunteers which are not necessarily familiar with GIScience and data collection procedures, the quality of gathered information has always been a main concern for both research and industrial communities. Several research studies have been conducted to…

  • New ways in analysing multi-scale datasets

    Many user-generated datasets (e.g., social media) reflect a number of different phenomena. Consequently, these datasets also comprise very different spatial scales. It goes without saying that this evokes tremendous challenges when conducting spatial statistical analyses of such datasets. When assessing spatial autocorrelation among the observations, for example, classical approaches are usually not appropriate. These were…

  • Nepal Disaster Mapping Heidelberg University

    Following the earthquake which struck Nepal on April 25 hundreds of volunteers worldwide come together to map out disaster affected areas through the coordination of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) and the local partner in Kathmandu, the Kathmandu Living Labs team. Disastermappers Heidelberg joined the efforts on monday evening by organizing a first mapping event.…

  • 3D Field Trip to Greece – Exploring 3D GIScience in one of the most exciting geological settings

    Our students learned how multiple 3D geodata sensor systems (LiDAR, UAVs, GNSS) can be used to capture and analyze the geomorphology and geology of one of the most exciting geological areas, the Peloponnese in Greece. Together with the geology students from the University of Stavanger more than 30 young researchers explored the area around the…

  • Mapping for wheelchair users at Heidelberg castle gardens

    On the occasion of the European protest day for equal rights of people with disabilities the Heidelberg advisory board of people with disabilities organises an event at Heidelberg castle tomorrow (30/4) from 2pm to 5pm. Our local CAP4ACCESS team is happy to join this event by leading mapping efforts to fill some data gaps in…

  • Disaster OpenRouteService for Nepal

    Facing the most severe earthquake for the past decades, Nepal and especially the Kathmandu area show unimagineable devastations. In order to provide emergency and rescue forces with near real time information concerning infrastructural conditions of roads and buildings the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (H.O.T.) as part of the OpenStreetMap Community coordinates the crisis mapping activities for…

  • European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly 2015: 3D Spatial Data, Analysis, Visualization and Infrastructures in Geosciences – From 3D Point Clouds to Information

    The GIScience Group Heidelberg participated actively in the EGU 2015 in Vienna, giving talks of current LiDAR research in the PICO Session “3D Spatial Data, Analysis, Visualization and Infrastructures in Geosciences – From 3D Point Clouds to Information“. Kristina gave a talk on “LiDAR Vegetation Investigation and Signature Analysis System (LVISA)” and presented the LVISA…

  • Option for wheelchair routing now available within OpenRouteService

    We are happy to announce that the first version of the wheelchair routing profile is now available online within OpenRouteService and goes into beta testing phase. Currently, there is a separate version (http://openrouteservice.org/wheelchair-2.1/) for testing that contains this new feature, which currently covers Germany only. However, after beta testing, it will also be available via…

  • Report on the 4th PCC Meeting of CAP4Access project

    On the 7th and 8th of April, our GIScience research group hosted the 4th PCC meeting of CAP4Access project in Heidelberg. The meeting was aimed to discuss the feedbacks and comments received from the reviewers of European Commission from the first evaluation meeting and various items where discussed from both theoretical and technical perspectives. As the normal procedure…

  • CAP4Access e-Newsletter No. 2, 2015 (Part 2) – toilets, survey, crowdcrafting and news

    This is the Second Part of the CAP4Access e-Newsletter No 2. 2015. The First Part can be found here. (It needed to be splitted in two parts for technical reasons) Finding accessible toilets made easy People in wheelchairs and other people with mobility impairments must be able to find an accessible toilet when needed. What…

  • Geo-reCAPTCHA: Crowdsourcing large amounts of geographic information from earth observation data

    With the Geo-reCAPTCHA we present a new concept for crowdsourcing of vast amounts of geoinformation by micro-mapping tasks. The paper can be downloaded free of charge (until 22 May 2015). In our study we investigated the possibilities and limitations of capturing building footprints via Geo-reCAPTCHA based on remote sensing imagery. We could analyze more than…