GIScience / Geoinformatics Research Group

This blog post is the start of a series of posts, which describe what you are able to do using the ohsome framework developed at the Heidelberg Institute of Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT). OpenStreetMap (OSM), the biggest open map of our world, offers not only the current state of the data, but the whole historical evolution [...]

F-B Mocnik participates in the Complex Networks 2018 conference, presenting work about the impact of space on network representations.  Street networks have been examined in respect to their structure.  F-B Mocnik has previously examined networks from various domains, thereby demonstrating that the polynomial volume law applies to many of them.  The presentation at the conference [...]

Christmas is just around the corner and the disastermappers heidelberg are organizing another workshop on the use of OpenStreetMap data. As last year they will present different ways to craft personal Christmas gifts based on OpenStreetMap features. Additionally they will also show how to use open satellite imagery archives captured by Sentinel and Landsat mission. Together we [...]

We are happy to hereby share latest information about the 5th HOT Summit- the annual gathering of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team community- which after great events in Washington, Brussels, Ottawa and Dar es Salaam, will next year come to the picturesque city of Heidelberg, September 19th and 20th. HOT Summit 2019 as well as the [...]

A mechanistic understanding of human activity patterns lays a foundation for many applications. The majority of the current research aims to outline human activity patterns mainly from spatiotemporal perspectives (i.e., modeling human mobility patterns), lacking of understanding of the motivations behind behaviors. The aim of a recently published study is to model and understand human [...]

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 [...]

Conceptual compliance measures to what degree contributors of volunteered geographic information (VGI) are using proposed tagging-standards. Here, we look into OpenStreetMap (OSM) as the most well-known example for VGI. In OSM the most important tagging guideline is defined by its wiki. In addtion, OSM editors like iD or JOSM provide presets (default options to adhere to tagging standards). This [...]

Understanding how citizens interact with transportation system is a key to solving a variety of urban issues in general and traffic congestion in particular. Recently, scholars have put efforts on the pertinent work ranging from developing traffic predictors to understanding human mobility and activity patterns. Multiple types of data have been used, of which crowdsourced [...]

How does a sandy beach naturally restore after a storm event? Invaluable information on this process is provided by a highly temporal (hourly) time series of 3D point cloud data acquired over several months at the beach of Kijkduin (NL). The permanent LiDAR system is operated by a team of TU Delft researchers in the [...]

The 10th “Fachaustausch Geoinformation“, a networking  event for professionals in the geodata and geoinformation domain organised yearly by GeoNet.MRN, took place in Heidelberg’s Print Media Academy on November 29th. GIScience research group at Heidelberg University and HeiGIT (Heidelberg Center for Geographic Information Technology) presented current research and projects at the event’s exhibition, including the latest [...]