Month: July 2017

  • Heidelberg Center for the Environment: Bernhard Höfle joins the Board of Directors

    The Executive Committee of the Heidelberg Center for the Environment (HCE) – the interdisciplinary research center for Environmental Sciences at Heidelberg University – has appointed Prof. Bernhard Höfle as new Vice-Director for Natural Sciences. Prof. Thomas Meier was appointed new Executive Director and Prof. Jale Tosun new Vice-Director for Social Sciences. The directors are responsible…

  • Determination of building inundation depths based on user-generated flood images – new study published

    In our recently published study “Direct local building inundation depth determination in 3-D point clouds from user-generated flood images” we present a new approach for deriving local building inundation depth from ordinary user-generated flood images captured during a flood event. After reconstructing a 3-D scene of the building of interest with close-range photogrammetry (CRP) algorithms,…

  • 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…

  • Happy Birthday MapSwipe!

    Already one year ago that MapSwipe was officially launched! A big thank you to our contributors for your support – one year of tapping, swiping and putting families on the map! In just one year thousands of users contributed more than 10 million taps and thereby provided crucial information on unmapped places. In projects like…

  • Martin Hämmerle receives PhD

    Yesterday, our colleague Dr. Martin Hämmerle defended his PhD thesis with great success. We would like to congratulate him – with our sincere thanks for his hard work and amazing research the last years. Martin is an expert on 3D geodata (with focus on 3D point clouds from LiDAR and photogrammetry), methods for 3D processing…

  • 3D bathymetry measurements in shallow-water environments with a low-cost sensor – study published

    To take bathymetric measurements in areas with shallow water is very challenging for methods such as SONAR or bathymetric LiDAR. In our study “Assessing the Potential of a Low-Cost 3-D Sensor in Shallow-Water Bathymetry”, we examine the performance of a low-cost 3D camera when capturing bathymetry in waters up to 0.4 m depth. The tested…

  • Reducing stress by avoiding noise with ‘Quiet Routing’ in OpenRouteService

    Noise pollution is a growing problem in many urban environments, affecting citizens’ daily life. It can reduce citizens’ happiness, increase their stress, and even people them get sick if they are exposed to noise pollution for a long period of time. In recent studies we investigate the use of crowdsourced data to derive noise polluted…

  • Job Offer: Software Engineer Geoinformation Technology / OpenStreetMap

    Open Position: Software Engineer Geoinformation Technology / OpenStreetMap Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) In order to promote technology transfer and applied research in the area of ​​Geoinformatics, the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) is currently being established with the support of the Klaus-Tschira Foundation. http://www.heigit.org. This is to be continued in the future…

  • GIScience Colloquium talk on “Heatmapping”: Accessing Geodatabases of Building Stocks for the Development of Spatial Energy System Models by Sebastian Blömer

    we cordially invite everybody interested to our next open GIScience colloquium talk “Heatmapping”: Accessing Geodatabases of Building Stocks for the Development of Spatial Energy System Models Sebastian Blömer ifeu Institut für Energie- und Umweltforschung Heidelberg Time and date: Mon, July 10, 2.15 pm Venue: INF 348, Room 015, Department of Geography, Heidelberg University To evaluate the…

  • Introducing Healthy Routing preferring Green Areas with OpenRouteService

    Research in psychology and public health shows that there are environmental factors that cause an area to impose more or less stress to a person. One example is that being surrounded by natural green areas (meadows, parks, trees and forests etc. or also blue water areas) has a relaxing influence to the mood of a…

  • Analysing Accessibility of Amazon.com Logistics for all the US with OpenRouteService Isochrones API

    Recently Barrons studied the effect of Amazon.com buying Whole Foods for US$13.7 billion. They used the OpenRouteService Isochrones API for an detailed accessibility analysis of the whole US. With OpenStreetMap based OpenRouteService and US Census data they calculated how much US population is covered within different driving times from the US wide network of the 444 Whole…