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GIScience Blog

Category: Software

  • 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…

  • OSHDB: a framework for spatio-temporal analysis of OpenStreetMap history data

    Earlier we published several blogposts introducing the ohsome platform and its parts (e.g. the ohsome API for example, which was often showcased here in the blog) and its backbone the OSHDB (very recently version 0.5 was published). A recent open access journal article gives even more background to the system, as shown below: Raifer, M,…

  • Projekt “TARDUR” startet: Open-Source-Routenplanung mit zeitabhängigen Beschränkungen

    Zeitabhängige Sperrungen und Nutzungsbeschränkungen von Straßen werden bislang in keiner frei verfügbaren Software zur Routenplanung genutzt. In dem im März gestarteten Projekt “TARDUR – Temporal Access Restrictions for Dynamic Ultra-Flexible Routing” gehen die Universität Heidelberg und die Firma GraphHopper dieses Problem an. Das Projekt wird im Rahmen der Förderrichtlinie Modernitätsfonds (“mFUND”) mit insgesamt 100.000 Euro…

  • Project “TARDUR” starts: Open-source routing with time-dependent restrictions

    Time-dependent restrictions and temporal road closures are so far not considered in any freely available software for route planning. Heidelberg University and the company GraphHopper aim to address this issue in their joint project “TARDUR – Temporal Access Restrictions for Dynamic Ultra-Flexible Routing”. The project started in March and is supported by the Federal Ministry…

  • OpenStreetMap History Database – version 0.5

    The OpenStreetMap History Database (OSHDB) is what powers most of the functionality of HeiGIT’s ohsome platform. The ohsome API for example, which was often showcased here in the blog, is built on top of the OSHDB. Just recently, an open access software article about the OSHDB was published. Check it out to find out more…

  • Preview of new Openrouteservice Client for Web and Mobile

    A first preview on the new client for Openrouteservice has been released as a public beta. It is available at https://openrouteservice.org/map/ . Wit the features implemented until now the new map client is already functional. `There are some important functionalities to be implemented yet`, but it is already useful for routing. It is also important…

  • How to become ohsome part 4: handling a snake in a notebook on another planet

    Welcome back to a new episode of how to become ohsome. Yes, you’ve read the heading correctly. We are really talking about a snake in a notebook on another planet. If you are familiar with one of the most used programming languages in the GIS world, you might already know by now which snake is…