Category: VGI Group

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • How to combine OpenStreetMap and Airborne Laser Scanning data for updating Digital Elevation Models?

    The answer can be found in our most recent paper “Updating Digital Elevation Models via Change Detection and Fusion of Human and Remote Sensor Data in Urban Environments” that has just been finally released in the International Journal of Digital Earth. You can find a preprint version of the article freely accessible here: http://koenigstuhl.geog.uni-heidelberg.de/publications/2015/Hoefle/Klonner_et_al_2015_preprint.pdf Citation…

  • Deriving sidewalk information using citizen science becomes #ProjectOfTheWeek

    We are happy to report that our task designed for the citizen science platform crowdcrafting.org was selected as their #ProjectOfTheWeek. This will help us to finish our experiment to derive information about sidewalks using Mapillary street level imagery with the support of the crowd very soon. Sidewalk information is an important resource for accessible route…

  • Visualising GPS data from OpenStreetMap using WebGL

    GPS data uploaded to the OpenStreetMap servers is a popular example of what is called Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). The data has been (and is still) collected by the project contributors primarily to support mapping. As the inclusion of roads and paths in the map is a major goal of the project, the collected GPS…

  • Twitter location (sometimes) matters

    In contrast to photo-based VGI (e.g. Flickr) the correlation between the place where an information has been created and what the information is about is less intuitive for text-based VGI. In order to gain more insight into the relationship between text information generated in mobile contexts (e.g. via smartphones) and their recorded location, research has…

  • GIScience group covered by Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung

    Our #mapforaccess mapping party has been covered in yesterdays issue of the local newspaper Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung (~80,000 copies per day in the Rhine-Neckar region). Enjoy reading! (Click to enlarge) Online version here.

  • Report on CAP4Access meeting in Elche, Spain

    The 3rd official meeting for CAP4Access project took place in the beautiful city of Elche in Spain during 28 to 30th of October 2014. The morning of the first day was spent in a press conference at the municipality of Elche where the mayor of the city gave a talk regarding the importance of this…

  • An assessment of a collaborative mapping approach for exploring land use patterns for several European metropolises

    A new research paper entitled “An assessment of a collaborative mapping approach for exploring land use patterns for several European metropolises” has been published in International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation. Abstract: Until recently, land surveys and digital interpretation of remotely sensed imagery have been used to generate land use inventories. These techniques however,…

  • Field experiment: a low-cost approach for deriving pedestrian sidewalk network data

    As a task for CAP4Access project, on Monday 11th of August, members of the Smart Simulation group (Mohamed Bakillah, Amin Mobasheri and Sarah Labusga) of GIScience at Heidelberg University performed a field experiment together with people with limited mobilities. Several GPS trackers (with different characteristics and predefined parameters for data collection) were installed on three wheelchairs and for a selected…