News of Heidelberg University’s GIScience Research Group.
Posted in OSM, Press release, Public Health, Research on Jan 4th, 2021
Updated based on newly available vaccination center locations at the 14th of January 2021.
Vaccination of a sufficiently large share of the population is considered the most important action to fight the spread of SARS-CoV -2 and resulting COVID-19 infections. Germany has started together with the majority of EU member states at the 27th of December [...]
Posted in OSM, Research, Services, Software on Nov 26th, 2020
What is the idea behind the Notebook?
In the case of an emergency (e.g. floods, earthquakes, political crisis) it is important to know where the health facilities are located. Furthermore, it is important to identify which cities/districts have a reduced or no access at all to health facilities before an emergency. [...]
These days so much is different- also conferences. Carolin Klonner and Marcel Reinmuth attended the GeOnG 2020 virtually. Thanks to the organizers!
It worked well and there was great exchange between the participants. The workshop on experiences in defining health catchment areas brought together diverse stakeholders and approaches. Marcel Reinmuth contributed from the scientific open technology [...]
The HeiKA autumn school urban data science that took place last week was a good success with participating students varying between five and fifteen during the week. Topics covered included visualization, spatial statistics, analysis of movement data, intrinsic data quality assessment based on the ohsome API and the use of the openrouteservice API. Hands-on exercises [...]
Posted in OSM, Publications, Research on Oct 21st, 2020
New paper published on healthcare access in Sub-Saharan Africa
It is almost a year since SARS-CoV-2 first emerged in China. The virus spread all over the world. Countries south of the Sahara did not receive much attention. Although outbreaks here have a strong risk potential due to existing crises. In our new published paper we modeled [...]
With the release of openrouteservice v6.3.0 at HeiGIT, we are presenting a new and improved speed-up technique that makes it possible to calculate much larger isochrones than with the existing algorithm. An isochrone is an area on the map that can be reached from a starting point within a time or distance limit specified by [...]
[tl;dr]
Using hospital locations and the ORS Isochrone service, we have created a method for comparing physical access to healthcare in Sub-Saharan Africa. Hospital locations were derived from OpenStreetMap and compared against another free available dataset. Results indicate strong similarity in both hospital datasets, however the uncertainty of our method requires further evaluation.
Figure 1 Stacked barchart [...]
Posted in External Projects, Services on Jun 15th, 2020
Sveriges Television AB (the public Swedish television company) has published a data journalism WebApp showing how far one can travel according to the recommendations from the Swedish Public Health Authority. Of course the safest recommendation is not to travel at all during the corona crises - but if one absolutely has to, shorter trips of [...]
Posted in External Projects, Services on Mar 1st, 2019
Where is the next health center? What areas show less accessibility to health centers and are therefore the most vulnerable?
In 2018, the openrouteservice team already illustrated how these questions related to vulnerability can be addressed with openrouteservice APIs, at that time for disaster prone regions in Madagascar. Learn more here.
Also at that time our Missing [...]
Finally there is a new version of the QGIS plugin for OpenRouteService: ORS Tools. It gives easy access to our directions, isochrone and matrix API’s from within QGIS.
The old plugin OSM Tools plugin has been deprecated due to its name being too generic. However, the name is not the only thing that changed:
Create routes from [...]