Month: September 2014

  • GIScience at the GIScience

    Last week members of the GIScience Research Group were attending the Eight International Conference on Geographic Information Science in Vienna. Beside the interesting welcome note given by Andrew U. Frank and further follow-up keynote talks, the first conference day was opened up for full day workshops covering various topics of GIScience. Geographic Information Workshop In…

  • A practical algorithm for labelling areal features outside their boundaries

    One of the subtasks of automated map labelling that has received little attention so far is the labelling of areas. Geographic areas often are represented by concave polygons which pose severe limitations on straightforward solutions due to their great variety of shape, a fact worsened by the lack of measures for quantifying feature-label relationships. In…

  • DFG project on extracting emotions for urban research started

    Recently the new research project “Urban Emotions” has started. It is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and aims at the development of a methodology to extract contextual emotional information for spatial planning based on real-time people-as-sensors and crowdsourcing approaches with social media. The spatial and social structures of a city and its underlying…

  • High Rankings for Heidelberg University

    While this is a bit off-subject it might be interesting to know that Heidelberg University as a whole scored again very well in the latest international university rankings: According to both QS World University Ranking and Shanghai Ranking it is again the best university in Germany and increased it’s worldwide ranking to 49.

  • Co-Chair of Geoinformatics Working Group @ DGPF

    The Working Group of Geoinformatics of the German Society for Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Geoinformation (DGPF) is led by Prof. Jan-Hendrik Haunert from the University of Osnabrück. The working group deals with research questions related to Geo-Information Systems (GIS), such as the integration of GIS and image data, GIS analysis algorithms and geospatial data infrastructures.…

  • Summary of CAP4Access workshop in Heidelberg

    On the 12th and 13th of August 2014, the Smart Simulation Group led by Dr. Mohamed Bakillah of the GIScience Research Group at Heidelberg University organized and hosted an internal workshop for the CAP4Access project partners. The aim of this workshop was to present and discuss the activities, sharing of tasks, ongoing progress and issues…

  • Understanding the potential relationship between the socio-economic variables and contributions to OpenStreetMap

    A new research paper titled “Understanding the potential relationship between the socio-economic variables and contributions to OpenStreetMap” has been published in the International Journal of Digital Earth. Abstract: OpenStreetMap (OSM) has seen an exponential increase in the last few years and large volumes of geodata have been received from volunteered individuals. The collected geodata are…

  • Visitors from the ITC

    On tuesday morning a delegation from the ITC (Enschede, Netherlands) visited our GIScience research group in Heidelberg. The visiting group consisted of master students and Prof. Frank Ostermann, who was leading the excursion. Their aim was to get an impression of the multifaceted research that is going on in our group. Some members of our…

  • Field experiment: deriving pedestrian sidewalk information using LIDAR technology

    On 11th of September, the second experiment for the CAP4Access project for Heidelberg pilot city was performed by Smart Simulation group (led by Mohamed Bakillah) with collaboration of LIDAR research group of Heidelberg University. Bernhard Höfle, Amin Mobasheri and Evelyn Schmitz participated in this fieldwork, using RIEGL VZ-400 laser scanning device in order to collect…

  • Natural Disasters 2.0: Video about VGI in Disaster Management at Reiss-Engelhorn Museum in Mannheim

    How can new mobile technologies and social media open up new ways of social engagement and support before, during and in the aftermath of a disaster? This question is the leitmotiv of the video called “Naturkatastrophen 2.0” (Natural Disasters 2.0), created by Melanie Eckle and Benjamin Herfort, two undergraduate research assistants of the GIScience group,…

  • Stenomaps: A new visual encoding for thematic maps

    Administrative regions and attached statistical data are often simply displayed by the contentious choropleth technique. A recent research collaboration between researchers from the Technical University Eindhoven, City University London and the GIScience group at Heidelberg University successfully added a new arrow to the quiver of Geovisualisation techniques: The Stenomap. The stenomap comprises a series of…

  • A new edited book on the way

    We are pleased to announce that a book edited by Dr. Marco Helbich, Dr. Jamal Jokar Arsanjani, Dr. Micheal Leitner titled “Computational Approaches for Urban Environments” is about to be released shortly. The edited book will be published by Springer in its “Geotechnologies and the Environment” series, edited by Jay D. Gatrell and Ryan R.…