News of Heidelberg University’s GIScience Research Group.
Posted in Services on Sep 14th, 2017
The second noteworthy news this week is that we have finally introduced the much-awaited time-distance matrix service with which you can finally compute one-to-many, many-to-one or many-to-many routes for any mode of transport provided by OpenRouteService. This service basically provides a terribly fast computation of time and distance between a set of input locations. Let’s [...]
Posted in Services on Sep 12th, 2017
Less restrictions; added SAC
In the past you might have noticed that by using dynamic options - for instance avoidables or vehicle characteristics - your routes were restricted to a much smaller distances than without using any kind of profile parameters. The latest version of the API resolves this issue and lets you compute routes up [...]
The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is currently coordinating OSM mapping activities as response to Hurricane “Irma” which is affecting the islands of the Caribbean and Florida, as well as to the severe floods in Bangladesh. Besides these two heavily affected regions, in the early morning hours a severe earthquake with magnitude of 8.1 hit Mexico.
In [...]
Posted in Services on Aug 26th, 2017
Many people asked us, whether it would be possible to see their own contributions to MapSwipe on the map. Therefore, in the last few days we worked on a small project to extend our MapSwipe Analytics page.
The new “Live View” shows the latest contributions from the MapSwipe volunteers and functions similar to the show-me-the-way tool, [...]
Posted in Events, External Projects, Press release, Services on Aug 10th, 2017
We are happy to hereby announce the official partnership of the HeiGIT/GIScience Research Group Heidelberg and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT)!
The GIScience Research Group at Heidelberg University has been supporting the use of OpenStreetMap for humanitarian and disaster management purposes already since 2008 when the first instance of the Disaster and Emergency OpenRouteService was developed [...]
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 [...]
Posted in Crowd Analyser, OSM, Services, VGI Group on Jul 10th, 2017
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 [...]
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 [...]
Posted in Press release, Services on Jul 2nd, 2017
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 [...]
Since the launch of the MapSwipe Analytics webpage three month ago we were able to improve our service and offer more detailed information on each project in MapSwipe. MapSwipe is a mobile App for crowdsourcing geographic information needed by humanitarian organisations like Red Cross and Doctors without Borders (MSF) introduced earlier. In particular the data can be used for priorizing areas [...]