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GIScience Blog

Tag: CAP4Access

  • Successful PhD Defense by Amin Mobasheri on OSM quality enrichment for wheelchair routing

    Last Friday Amin Mobasheri of the GIScience Research Group Heidelberg University successfully defended his PhD in Geoinformatics. Due to the Corona pandemy the defense was conducted in hybrid mode with the committee members participating virtually and only Prof. Zipf and Amin being physically in the room. What a shame there was no joint celebration possible…

  • Recommendations for organising better mapping parties with the aim of improving OpenStreetMap and Wheelmap data completeness

    Nowadays, several research projects show interest in employing volunteered geographic information (VGI) to improve their systems through using up-to-date and detailed data. The European project CAP4Access was one of the successful examples of such international-wide research projects that aimed to improve the accessibility of people with restricted mobility using crowdsourced data. In this project, OpenStreetMap…

  • How much do you know about Wheelmap?

    Within the European FP7 project “CAP4Access“, we studied the usage of crowdsourced geographic information (and more specifically OpenStreetMap data) for improving accessibility in selected European regions. This 3 year research study led to several implementations and extensions of Open Source GI solutions with respect to OSM data quality assessment as well as wheelchair routing and…

  • Routing for Accessibility – new Project with City of Heidelberg

    Accessibility is a widely discussed topic and there are a growing number of efforts to sensitise European cities and municipalities to the topic. A focus of such efforts is the facilitation of easy access to public places for everyone, including those with walking disabilities, balance and visual disorders, as well as people requiring the use…

  • Third successful Wheelmap event with volunteers of SAP at Heidelberg

    On Monday 09 October 2017 the GIScience group of Heidelberg university organised another Wheelmap mapping event for SAP volunteers in the course of the “SAP month of service“. Volunteers of SAP already supported the CAP4Access team in merging volunteered accessibility data (from Wheelmap.org) and expert accessibility data (from Heidelberg Hürdenlos) two years ago and by…

  • Adding Landmark based Navigation Instructions to OpenRouteService

    A recently published paper (Rousell & Zipf 2017) presents a prototype navigation service extending OpenRouteService (Schmitz et al. 2008) that extracts landmarks suitable for pedestrian navigation instructions from the OSM dataset based on several metrics. In general, when providing instructions on how to get somewhere, people generally include landmarks in their instructions – “Turn left…

  • Are Crowdsourced Datasets Suitable for Specialized Routing Services? Case Study of OpenStreetMap for Routing of People with Limited Mobility

    Using data generated from the crowd has become a hot topic for several application domains including transportation. However, there are concerns regarding the quality of such datasets. As one of the most important crowdsourced mapping platforms, in a recent study (1) we analyze the fitness for use of OpenStreetMap (OSM) database for routing and navigation…

  • Towards a Landmark based pedestrian Navigation Service using OpenStreetMap data

    Within wayfinding and navigation tasks, the use of landmarks has been found to be a key aspect. In particular pedestrian instructions should focus on the delivery of “landmarks” to aid in navigation. Still the use of landmarks is not common in many navigation systems. The salience of features is an important aspect of whether they…

  • 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…

  • Why is it routing this way?

    When using routing services that rely on OpenStreetMap data, the route engine might suggest you a path that seems to be longer than the shortest possible route you could identify on the map. The main reason behind this are either a lack of data completeness in OSM (for certain data attributes/ for certain regions) or…

  • “Exploitation Strategy” seminar for CAP4Access project

    Last week on Monday 12th, we organized a workshop for the CAP4Access project that aimed to discuss ideas and methods on how the developed tools and services within the project would be exploited especially after the project has came to an end. Dr. Emmanuel Sofianopoulos was the expert for the workshop appointed by the European Commission. The…

  • Mapping ramps on the ocassion of the UN International Day of Persons with Disabilities at Heidelberg

    On Saturday 3rd December 2016 the CAP4Access team from GIScience group of Heidelberg university led a Wheelmap mapping event on the ocassion of the United Nations International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPD) at Heidelberg. Wheelmap.org is a map for finding wheelchair accessible places and it is run by one of our CAP4Access project partners,…