Month: March 2017

  • Utilizing crowdsourced data for studies of cycling and air pollution

    Recently, Strava, a popular website and mobile app dedicated to tracking athletic activity (cycling and running), began offering a data service called Strava Metro, designed to help transportation researchers and urban planners to improve infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians. Strava Metro data has the potential to promote studies of cycling and health by indicating where…

  • Alexander von Humboldt PostDoc Fellowship for A. Yair Grinberger for Big Spatial Data Research in Heidelberg

    Asher Yair Grinberger (Jerusalem) has been awarded a prestigious Alexander von Humboldt PostDoc Fellowship. He will join the GIScience Research Group Heidelberg later this summer to work for two years on developing theory & methods related to Big Spatial Data. We are looking forward working with him in Heidelberg. But you have the chance to…

  • 10 Million Contributions: It’s time for MapSwipe Analytics!

    The MapSwipe App is widely used by many volunteers who donate their time and brain capacity to find buildings or roads on satellite imagery. Just recently we counted the 10,000,000th contribution! After only 6 months since MapSwipe was launched! The outcome of these efforts are mainly used by humanitarian organisations like MSF, Netherlands Red Cross…

  • NEOHAZ goes in the second round

    The NEOHAZ project will be funded by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities for a second phase till the end of 2018. This prolonging enables further research about the integration of implicit knowledge from non-scientists in disaster management. The findings and methods of the first part will be used within the context of a…

  • GIScience at FOSSGIS conference

    Last week, the German FOSSGIS conference about Free and Open Source GIS software was held in Passau. GIScience was also there with a small delegation, presenting some of our current research topics, from routing, to data analysis and machine learning. The talks (in German language) are already available on youtube, for example: Routenplanung durch Flächen…

  • Impressions from CASper Workshop and PerCom

    Last week saw the Workshop on Crowd Assisted Sensing, Pervasive Systems and Communications (CASPer 2017) at the 15th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications. Here you find some impressions from the event. Alexander Zipf participated as invited panelist at the panel session of CASPer 2017. The panel discusses processing unstructured Big Data and…

  • GIScience in practice during the KinderUni Heidelberg

    On Saturday, 18.03.2017, the Neuenheimer Feld of the University Heidelberg was the area of interest for children participating in the GIScience KinderUni workshop at the Institute of Geography “MapSwipe und uMap – Mach‘ mit beim Mappen an PC, Tablet und Smartphone”. After an introduction about Geography and Geodata in general, they could do some mapping…

  • Towards evaluating the mobile crowdsourcing of geographic information about human settlements

    Geographic information crowdsourcing is an increasingly popular approach to derive geographic data about human settlements from remotely sensed imagery. However, crowdsourcing approaches are frequently associated with uncertainty about the quality of the information produced. Although previous studies have found acceptable quality of crowdsourced information in some application domains, there is still lack of research about…

  • First Impressions HeiGIT @ CeBIT: Smart GeoServices for Smart Cities

    This week you still have the chance to meet colleagues from HeiGIT team at CeBIT 2017 in Hannover. We present Smart GeoServices for Smart Cities in Halle 7 at the Smart City Forum booth together with our colleagues from heidelberg mobil.

  • HeiGIT at FOSSGIS: today several presentations on OSM technology

    in case you are this week not at CeBIT in the north of Germany, but rather at FOSSGIS in the south, you have the chance meet us also there and listen to several presentations on OSM work at HeiGIT and GIScience HD by our team member Martin Raifer. The main talk will be on OSM-History-Analysis…

  • A graph-based strategy for matching points-of-interests from different VGI sources

    Several urban studies have been increasingly relying on spatial data provided by Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) sources. The matching of features across different VGI projects may serve to assess and improve the reliability and completeness of VGI data. In a recent study, we first provide a short discussion on the similarity measures often used for…

  • Missing Maps talk at Impact Hub Bergen

    How can we combine technology and digitalisation with doing good? That is the main focus for the 2017 Impact Night series organized by and at the Impact Hub Bergen. Last evenings Impact Night was about Tech for Change and disaster response. Therefore the Impact Hub team invited Per Aarvik, President of the StandbyTaskForce, Sam Applebee,…