News of Heidelberg University’s GIScience Research Group.
Posted in Research on Jun 30th, 2017
In the aftermath of a disaster, knowing the condition of buildings, infrastructure, and utilities is critical to both immediate response and long-term recovery efforts. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is often asked to help identify damage to buildings and other assets in the affected region. In the past, limitations in post-disaster [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 30th, 2017
On the occasion of the international Bike2Work Day the radio Berlin Brandenburg (RBB) conducted a short interview with Prof. Alexander Zipf (GIScience HD/ HeiGIT). It was about current research and development work at the GIScience Research Group Heidelberg and HeiGIT, which involve the use of user-generated geodata for investigations between cycling behaviour and health, as well as [...]
Posted in Events on May 12th, 2017
The “Dresdner Flächennutzungssymposium” is an annual event aimed at fostering the discussions about current devolepment regarding land use changes in Germany. During two days experts from government agencies, private companies and research institutions come together and elaborate the latest trends in different session. This years symposium took place from May 3-4. Almost all presentations covered [...]
Posted in Publications, VGI Group on May 7th, 2017
Tourism is a economically highly important industry. It is, however, vulnerable to disaster events. Geotagged social media data, as one of the forms of volunteered geographic information (VGI), has been widely explored to support the prevention, preparation, and response phases of disaster management, while little effort has been put on the recovery phase. A recently [...]
Posted in External Projects, OSM, Research on Apr 27th, 2017
In the aftermath of natural disasters an assessment of the impact and damage in the affected area is crucial to enable coordination of response and recovery. While the disaster preparedness and response activations by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in regard to infrastructure mapping have already proven great potential in various disaster events, due to a [...]
Posted in Publications, Research, VGI Group on Mar 31st, 2017
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 [...]
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 or [...]
Posted in Events on Mar 26th, 2017
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 [...]
Posted in Publications, Research, VGI Group on Mar 12th, 2017
Crowdsourced Geographic Information (CGI) has emerged as a potential source of geographic information for different domains. Despite advantages associated with it, such information lacks quality assurance, since it is provided by different individuals. Several authors have investigated different approaches to assess CGI quality. Some of the existing methods have been summarized in different classification schemas. [...]
Posted in Events on Mar 10th, 2017
Crowd assisted sensing and crowdsourcing, as well as their underlying pervasive systems and communications are a fast growing research area and one of the enabling technologies of smart cities and smart infrastructures, as well as important building blocks in healthcare monitoring and vehicular technologies. Crowd assisted sensing (often called participatory sensing) opens new ways for [...]