Last Saturday (21/2) the GIScience group Heidelberg was part of the International Open Data Day. Open data enthusiasts all over the world teamed up to create new applications derived from open (not only governmental) data. The local open data day in Mannheim has seen 7 finished projects including Wikipedia edit wars analyses, public transport visualisations, crowdsourcing, disaster speed mapping and OpenStreetMap data collection.
Already on Friday (20/2) afternoon about 25 interested persons met for talks in barcamp style regarding the application of open data in different domains, including mobility, internet of things, linked open data, disaster mapping and accessible routing using OpenStreetMap/Wheelmap. The latter two talks were presented by members of our group (Melanie Eckle for Disaster Mapping, Stefan Hahmann for OpenRouteService/Wheelmap).
On Saturday about 35 developers formed teams for a Hacktogether. The disaster mappers Heidelberg succesfully performed mapping in the region of south Sudan.
The smart simulation group developed an extension for an OpenStreetMap quality analysis tool that shows streets that do not have a sidewalk tag yet. Furthermore tasks for the platform crowdcrafting.org were designed to detect sidewalks from Mapillary imagery using the power of the crowd. Volunteers are invited to contribute to this task. We hope that both tools will help to improve OpenStreetMap data quality on sidewalks, which is of high relevance for accessible route planning in the context of the CAP4ACCESS project and beyond.