Category: Software

  • MapSwipe 2.0: Reimagining how a mobile app can support humanitarian response worldwide

    In 2015, MapSwipe began as a solution to a complex question: how do we better identify where communities and populations are, allowing mapping to be more efficient and effective? Using a simple mobile app, volunteers are able to swipe through a series of satellite images, tapping in areas where they find features. MapSwipe can be…

  • Using OSM data to generate scenes for LiDAR simulations in HELIOS

    A new tutorial for the 3DGeo‘s LiDAR simulation software HELIOS has been posted to the repository’s wiki page. It shows a simple way to generate scenes of real landscapes including building and vegetation models as well as terrain from NASA JPL’s SRTM data. When applied to OSM data in the city of Vienna, the obtained…

  • Recap of HeiGIT @ FOSS4G 2019

    First of all, thanks to everybody who attended our ohsome lab on OpenStreetMap History Analysis at last weeks FOSS4G in Bucharest. Even though there were eleven (!) tracks running in parallel, and our lab was not in the same location as the program track, we had some interested participants. Their affiliation ranged from public institutions…

  • New version of ORS Tools QGIS Plugin

    We’re happy to announce a new version of our QGIS Plugin ORS Tools. Additionally to the core services of giving easy access to our directions, isochrone and matrix API’s, the plugin now allows users to optimize their trips via a Traveling Salesman service. The openrouteservice API’s included a Vehicle Routing Optimization Machine since quite a…

  • HeiGIT presents ohsome Lab at FOSS4G 2019 Bucharest

    This week, the annual conference FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) is taking place in Bucharest, Romania. The conference is organized by The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and attracts over 1000 professionals from industry and academia each year. The HeiGIT Big Spatial Data Team will present the ohsome platform and related tools such as the…

  • Interested in time-dependent routing?

    We are delighted to invite you to join a workshop on open-source routing with time-dependent restrictions, see http://giscienceblog.uni-hd.de/2019/04/17/project-tardur-starts-open-source-routing-with-time-dependent-restrictions/. The workshop is taking place on Friday before the State of the Map conference, 20th September 2019 in Heidelberg. It is free of charge and will last from 9:00 to 16:00 with a lunch break in between.…

  • New ORS Jupyter example about Fleet Scheduling for Disaster Response with ORS and VROOM

    Routing optimization in a humanitarian context Routing optimization generally solves the Vehicle Routing Problem (a simple example being the more widely known Traveling Salesman Problem). A more complex example would be the distribution of goods by a fleet of multiple vehicles to dozens of locations, where each vehicle has certain time windows in which it can operate…

  • Constraints in multi-objective optimization of land use allocation – Repair or penalize?

    Land is a spare resource so it makes sense to think about how to use it most efficiently. This leads to the problem of land use allocation under consideration of trade-offs. Multi-objective optimization algorithms are a tool quantify the trade-offs by estimating the Pareto-optimal land use allocations. Often, constraints in the solution space have to…

  • The Triangle of Shared Data Sources

    Todays data production, maintenance, and use have changed in the last years.  While these tasks were reserved to professionals until a few years ago, the situation has changed.  This is no different in the geographical domain. Volunteers gather general information in Wikipedia and geographical information in OpenStreetMap.  Twitter users provide not only text snippets but…

  • Usage of HELIOS for various applications

    The Heidelberg LiDAR Operations Simulator (HELIOS) is an open source laser scanning simulation framework for interactive simulation and visualization of terrestrial, mobile and airborne laser scanning surveys. It can be flexibly used for teaching and training of laser scanning, development of new scanner hardware and scanning methods, or generation of artificial scan data sets to…

  • How to become ohsome part 5: Measuring numbers of users editing different OSM features

    Besides dealing with a snake, making quality assessments, or generating comparable statistics, one needs to know how to handle the whole functionality provided by the ohsome API to really become ohsome. And to achieve exactly that, this blog presents the last missing entry point to the API from the current toolkit, namely the /users resource. With its help you can receive aggregated…

  • MapSwipe for Change Detection Analysis

    The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) , the Heidelberg Institute of Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) , and the wider MapSwipe Community started working on an MapSwipe extension to monitor changes in satellite imagery. The goal of the two-month project is to extend the app with new functionalities that would allow the users to compare two satellite images…