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GIScience Blog

Category: VGI Group

  • DeepVGI: Deep Learning with Volunteered Geographic Information

    Deep learning techniques, esp. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), are now widely studied for predictive analytics with remote sensing images, which can be further applied in different domains for ground object detection, population mapping, etc. These methods usually train predicting models with the supervision of a large set of training examples. However, finding ground truths especially…

  • CAP4Access Comes to a Close

    On Tuesday 17th January, the CAP4Access/MyAccessible.EU came to a close after three years with the successful completion of the final European Commission review meeting in Brussels. Reviewers were highly pleased with the outcomes of the project, both on the technical and societal fronts. At GIScience in Heidelberg, through the EC FP7 project we have extended…

  • Intrinsic quality assessment of building footprints data on OpenStreetMap

    Recently some of our work on intrinsic VGI quality analysis has been published. In this work we propose a framework to assess the quality of OSM building footprints data without using any reference data. More specifically, the OSM history data will be examined regarding the development of attributes, geometries and positions of building footprints. In…

  • GIScience Research Group support for Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team Fundraising Campaign

    One main focus of the GIScience Research Group is the research and education with respect to advancing methods, technologies and applications of Volunteered Geographic Information – in particular OpenStreetMap – for applications from logistics to humanitarian aid. In this vein, the group has been also been supporting the work of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap (HOT) team…

  • How good can predictions from check-ins be?

    Check-in data such as provided by Foursquare is one kind of social media feeds which gained considerable interest over recent years. This interest is partly due to their high degree of semantic detail, given that users check-in at places which are categorized by a relatively well-defined taxonomy. One associated prevalent task, in research as well…

  • European COST action IC1203 reports about our work in CAP4Access project

    COST action IC1203 is a European Network Exploring Research into Geospatial Information Crowdsourcing: software and methodologies for harnessing geographic information from the crowd (ENERGIC). The action has been greatly active in the past 3 years and is now delivering the results via their website as well as their Youtube channel. One of the outputs of this…

  • European Handbook of Crowdsourced Geographic Information

    Recently, a new open access handbook edited by Capineri, et.al and supported by the European Commission – COST Action IC1203 (ENERGIC) has been published. This book focuses on the study of the remarkable new source of geographic information that has become available in the form of user-generated content accessible over the Internet through mobile and…

  • Two new DFG projects on VGI, OSM Quality and Social Media Analysis

    recently we were happy to receive the notification that two new research projects will be funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) the German main funding agency for fundamental research. Both projects belong to the DFG Priority Programme “Volunteered Geographic Information: Interpretation, Visualisation and Social Computing“ (SPP 1894). The two projects are: A:) IntrisicOSMquality: A framework…

  • A review of volunteered geographic information quality assessment methods

    While Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is gaining more and more popularity and VGI datasets are being used in various projects, there are always concerns about the quality of them. During the past years several studies have been performed regarding VGI quality assessment by employing different methods/approaches. However, if one needs to evaluate the quality of…

  • OpenRouteService 3.3 is going Mobile – Routing in the Americas, Gradients 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 3.3 based on OpenStreetMap data. After many requests from our community, we for starters can happily announce that we have made the service responsive for your mobile smartphones.…

  • Deriving incline values for street networks from voluntarily collected GPS traces

    When producing optimal routes through an environment, considering the incline of surfaces can be of great benefit in a number of use cases. For instance, incline may be considered when computing the most energy-efficient routes for electric cars and bicycles. Likewise, pedestrians with restricted mobility (such as wheelchair users, parents with pushchairs, and the elderly)…

  • A conceptual model for quality assessment of VGI for the purpose of flood management

    Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has emerged as a potential source of geographic information for different domains. Despite the many advantages associated with it, such information lacks of quality assurance, since it is provided by individuals with different motivations and backgrounds. In response to this, several methods have been proposed to assess the quality of volunteered…