Navigation Intelligence & Location Based Services
Analyses and Utilization of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI)
from the Crowd for Mobility, Navigation and Routing Services
Navigation and Routing play an important role for different kinds of purposes within the context of mobility. For example logistics companies depend on optimized access routes for freight deliveries, while hikers and cyclists continually seek for individually adapted trails. Answering such individual requirements needs a sophisticated set of specialized routing and navigation profiles, optimized for the specific user.
To this end, we process and enhance rich and crowd-generated Volunteered Geographic Information
to deliver specific services providing maximum benefit for the user.
Our Services
- Traffic- and Mobility Solutions, Accessibility Analysis, Data Analysis and Modelling related to Mobility and Transportation
- Development of Cloud-Services and APIs for specific Routing- and Navigation solutions with global coverage
- Design and Development of both Web- and Mobile Applications using the Spatial Context
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Many years of expertise in
OpenStreetMap
-based Services and Quality Assurance of user-generated content
Selected References GIScience Heidelberg
- OpenRouteService.org
- LABS.OpenRouteService.org (early test versions)
- Disaster OpenRouteService
- Campus Mobil
- CAP4Access
- TeleAgro+
- OpenMapSurfer
- OSM-WMS.de worldwide
- Mobility data market (TMC-OSM Integration)
Further Projects - Publications - PhD Thesis
Further Information
- Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology
- Big Spatial Data Analytics
- Disaster Mapping – VGI for Humanitarian Support
News
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 as an [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Using data generated from the crowd has become a hot topic for several application domains including transportation. However, there are concerns regarding the quality of such datasets. As one of the most important crowdsourced mapping platforms, in a recent study (1) we analyze the fitness for use of OpenStreetMap (OSM) database for routing and navigation [...]
Some of the results from our research are transformed into stable and professionally managed services, that are used by the wider public. A prominent example is OpenRouteService.org. Since it’s introduction in early 2008 it has been transformed now to a rigorously tested rich API that is hosted on a cloud system and that can be [...]
Recently a new “OSM Tools Plugin” for QGIS had been developed by Nils Nolde. It replaces the original OSMroute plugin for QGIS by Riccardo Klinger, which is now deprecated, as he unfortunately lacks the time to maintain it. Thanks a lot to Riccardo and Nils for their wonderful efforts and contributions so far! The new “OSM Tools” [...]
Recently HeiGIT @ GIScience Heidelberg released a dedicated stable disaster version of OpenRouteService (ORS) to support humanitarian logistics within specific regions of catastrophes with data from OSM in a more sustainable way. Since his start in 2008 OpenRouteServivce had been spontaneously applied for specific real world disaster cases already numerous times, for instance during the earthquakes in [...]
