Month: November 2016

  • Keynote at GEOINFO 2016 Brazil

    This week Alexander Zipf was giving an invited keynote presentation at the 18th Geoinfo Conference in Campos do Jordão, São Paulo, Brazil. The GEOINFO conferences aim to bring together leading GIScience and spatial database researchers, to present to the local community a perspective of the state-of-the-art in the area. Past speakers have included Max Egenhofer,…

  • Results of study “Direct derivation of maize plant and crop height from low-cost time-of-flight camera measurements” published

    In agriculture, information about the spatial distribution of crop height is valuable for applications such as biomass and yield estimation, or increasing field work efficiency in terms of fertilizing, applying pesticides, irrigation, etc. Established methods for capturing crop height often comprise restrictions in terms of cost and time efficiency, flexibility, and temporal and spatial resolution…

  • How good can predictions from check-ins be?

    Check-in data such as provided by Foursquare is one kind of social media feeds which gained considerable interest over recent years. This interest is partly due to their high degree of semantic detail, given that users check-in at places which are categorized by a relatively well-defined taxonomy. One associated prevalent task, in research as well…

  • Introducing OSMLanduse.org : OpenStreetMap Landuse Landcover (LULC) WebMap is Online

    Today a new global WebMap prototype “OSMLanduse.org” has been launched by GIScience Research Group Heidelberg. The map provides worldwide Landuse/Landcover information on the basis of OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. This is based on our earlier work on testing the suitability of OpenStreetMap for deriving landuse and landcover information (LULC). LULC data is highly relevant for many…

  • Successfull PhD Defence by Yingwei YAN

    Our recent team member Dr. Yingwei YAN successfully defended his PhD thesis this very week. We do congratulate him most cordially! The thesis was conducted at the National University of Singapore at the Department of Geography before he joined the GIScience Heidelberg team. Yingwei worked for example on using fuzzy set theory to assure the…

  • GIScience at Fachaustausch Geoinformation 2016

    On November 24th, “Fachaustausch Geoinformation“, a networking  event  for professionals in the geodata and geoinformation domain, took place in Heidelberg. It is organised every year by GeoNet.MRN, bringing together people, companies and institutions from the Rhein-Neckar region and beyond who are active in GIS, geoinformatics and GIScience. As in previous yeas, the GIScience research group…

  • Upcoming Wheelmap mapping event at Heidelberg on December 3rd

    December 3rd is the United Nations International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPD). In this scope the CAP4Access team from GIScience group of Heidelberg University invites any interested person to a public Wheelmap mapping event on Saturday 3rd December at Heidelberg. Similiar to previously organized Mapping Events we would like to improve the Wheelmap project…

  • 3rd PhD Colloquium of the DGK Section on Geoinformatics and the DGPF Working Group on Geoinformatics, 7 March 2017, Würzburg, Germany

    Call for Abstracts for the 3rd PhD Colloquium of the DGK Section on Geoinformatics and the DGPF Working Group on Geoinformatics March 7, 2017, in Würzburg prior to the DGPF annual meeting The Section on Geoinformatics (Sektion Geoinformatik) of the German Geodetic Commission (Deutsche Geodätische Kommission, DGK) and the Working Group on Geoinformatics (Arbeitskreis Geoinformatik)…

  • OSM GeoWeek contributions from Heidelberg to support climate change preparedness programs

    In the context of the international OpenStreetMap Geography Awareness Week,  last Thursay, 17th November 2016, another mapping event was organized at the Geographical Institute of Heidelberg University. Sava, a region in the north of Madagascar, was herein mapped in cooperation with Missing Maps and the French NGO CartONG. Madagascar is as one of the poorest…

  • Study published: “Characterizing tufa barrages in relation to channel bed morphology in a small karstic river by airborne LiDAR topo-bathymetry”

    We are pleased to announce the publication of the study “Characterizing tufa barrages in relation to channel bed morphology in a small karstic river by airborne LiDAR topo-bathymetry” in the Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association. The manuscript is already available online (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pgeola.2016.10.004) The motivation of the study is the high value of freshwater tufas in…

  • Two new tools provided on GITHub: HELIOS (LiDAR simulator), VOSTOK (3D solar potential calculation)

    On the GIScience GITHub, two new tools are now available: The Heidelberg LiDAR Operations Simulator HELIOS is a software package for interactive real-time simulation and visualization of terrestrial, mobile and airborne laser scanning surveys. Own virtual scenes can be generated by combining for example terrain models with other objects (buildings, vegetation). Own scan positions as…

  • Integrating MapSwipe and HOT Tasking Manager

    The MapSwipe app allows you to mark buildings and roads on satellite imagery within just a few seconds by tapping on your smartphone. Thousands of volunteers contributed to MapSwipe so far and it is just incredible how big the areas are that have been scanned (also see : With one swipe or tap you put…