Research Project
CAP4Access: Collective Awareness Platforms for Improving Accessibility in European Cities & Regions
The objective of CAP4Access is to develop and pilot-test methods and tools for collectively gathering and sharing spatial information for improving accessibility. The aim is to exploit the power of online maps and mobile devices for fostering awareness of barriers for individuals with limited mobility and in turn aid in the removal of such barriers.
CAP4Access helps integrating disabled communities into society (social sustainability), saving public resources e.g. by helping municipalities to focus expenditures (economic sustainability) and also saving natural resources e.g. by facilitating public transport use (ecological sustainability). Data sources will include citizen humans as sensors
, sensors in smartphones and Public Sector Information such as data held by local administrations which are of relevance to accessibility (e.g. road surface and width, traffic volumes and speed, elevation, road works). Target groups include people requiring enhanced accessibility; grassroots initiatives supporting people with disabilities; policy-makers, planners and service providers with responsibility for the built environment; and the general public. Rather than setting up a new platform, the tools to be developed will be pilot-tested on established platforms including Wheelmap, WheelchairRouting, and the OSM.
More specifically our research group will participate in developing:
- Collective tagging: Tools for tagging (human-as-sensor principle), annotating and facilitating the discussion of locations/places and routes/streets within the built environment according to their accessibility/suitability for individuals with limited mobility. Develop a tagging management system to support the collection of user-generated data.
- Quality assessment of crowd-sourced data: Develop a data quality assessment and management approach.
- Tools for integration of PSI/sponsored data in OSM based mapping platforms
- Routing and navigation: Develop and implement a data and model for cityscape navigation for persons with limited mobility.
- Tools targeting local initiatives for supporting awareness raising and collective action: Enabling local activities for creating awareness and initiating concrete measures for eliminating barriers for people with limited mobility.
This European project is funded for 3 years.
News
Last Friday Amin Mobasheri of the GIScience Research Group Heidelberg University successfully defended his PhD in Geoinformatics. Due to the Corona pandemy the defense was conducted in hybrid mode with the committee members participating virtually and only Prof. Zipf and Amin being physically in the room. What a shame there was no joint celebration possible […]
Nowadays, several research projects show interest in employing volunteered geographic information (VGI) to improve their systems through using up-to-date and detailed data. The European project CAP4Access was one of the successful examples of such international-wide research projects that aimed to improve the accessibility of people with restricted mobility using crowdsourced data. In this project, OpenStreetMap […]
Within the European FP7 project “CAP4Access“, we studied the usage of crowdsourced geographic information (and more specifically OpenStreetMap data) for improving accessibility in selected European regions. This 3 year research study led to several implementations and extensions of Open Source GI solutions with respect to OSM data quality assessment as well as wheelchair routing and […]
Accessibility is a widely discussed topic and there are a growing number of efforts to sensitise European cities and municipalities to the topic. A focus of such efforts is the facilitation of easy access to public places for everyone, including those with walking disabilities, balance and visual disorders, as well as people requiring the use […]
On Monday 09 October 2017 the GIScience group of Heidelberg university organised another Wheelmap mapping event for SAP volunteers in the course of the “SAP month of service“. Volunteers of SAP already supported the CAP4Access team in merging volunteered accessibility data (from Wheelmap.org) and expert accessibility data (from Heidelberg Hürdenlos) two years ago and by […]
