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GIScience Blog

Category: Research

  • Teaching and research in Santiago de Chile / Docencia e investigación en Santiago de Chile

    During the first half of May 2015, Bernhard Höfle and his NEOHAZ team members Carolin Klonner, Sabrina Marx and Tomás Usón were teaching at the Heidelberg Center for Latin America (HCLA) in Santiago de Chile as well as conducting research for the NEOHAZ project related to urban flood risk management. The project aims at analysing…

  • Mapping Support Event for Nepal at ISCRAM conference 2015 in Norway

    As members of the disastermappers heidelberg and the GIScience Research Group Benjamin Herfort and Melanie Eckle were presenting their research at this years ISCRAM conference in Kristiansand, Norway. ISCRAM being a conference for researchers and practitioners in the field of disaster and emergency management, they also used this situation to set up a spontaneous Mapping…

  • Mon-Shieh Yang successfully completes his PhD

    Mon-Shieh Yang successfully defended his PhD thesis at the National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) in Taiwan. We cordially congratulate him! Mon-Shieh was member of the Heidelberg GIScience Team for almost one year (until May 2015). He was performing research with the LiDAR Research Group (LRG) where he investigated the derivation of novel LiDAR-based roughness measures…

  • 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…