Research Project
WeGovNow – Towards We-Government: Collective and participative approaches for address local policy challenges
WeGovNow is a European Commission funded project aiming at using state-of-the-art digital technologies in community engagement platforms to engage citizens in decision making processes within their local neighbourhood. It aims at bringing together multiple citizen-driven systems into a single platform which will allows people to:
- Report, suggest and discuss improvements to their local area
- explore ways to fix problems through collective action
- find solutions for resource shortages affecting the quality of publicly provided services
- debate topics of a strategic nature
- develop and vote upon concrete suggestions for local policy action
Underlying this platform is the use of VGI and PSI datasets and the accommodation of different user perspectives and experience. Therefore, it is important to address aspects such as the quality of the data used and the best methods for conveying this quality information to the different end users.
At GIScience in Heidelberg, the focus of the research will be on:
- Methods for deriving quality metrics for VGI and PSI data to enable the determination of fitness-for-use
- Identify and implement suitable methods for portraying data quality information to different types of users
- Derive techniques for importing PSI data into the WeGovNow platform (and OSM where applicable) including the georeferencing of data lacking geographic coordinates.
This is a 3 year project funded through the European Commission Horizon 2020 call.
News
If you’re on the job market or know someone who is, check out this exciting new opening at GIScience. The offer is included as text below! You are interested in enhancing methods for analyzing & improving OpenStreetMap data? You are an experienced Spatial Data Scientist innovating geoinformatics methods & workflows? You have profound hands-on experience […]
We are happy to share that our paper “A Comprehensive Framework for Intrinsic OpenStreetMap Quality Analysis” (Barron, Neis, Zipf 2013) belongs to the top 5 most cited papers of the international journal “Transaction in GIS” (TGIS). Only recently we became aware of this. Thank you for considering this work. Certainly this paper influenced also our […]
Recently a new DFG project proposal was accepted to the GIScience Research Group Heidelberg within the DFG priority programme VisVGI (Volunteered Geographic Information: Interpretation, Visualisation and Social Computing” [SPP 1894]). It is joint collaboration project together with Prof. Begüm Demir from TU Berlin. IDEAL-VGI: Information Discovery from Big Earth Observation Data Archives by Learning from […]
Also the program of the “Academic Track” for ‘State of the Map‘ (SotM) as been released now. Early bird ticket prices are still available until 7th of July. See the website for all the details: 2019.stateofthemap.org Two contributions are by members of the GIScience Research Group Heidelberg: Analyzing the spatio-temporal patterns and impacts of large-scale data […]
In a previous blog post we performed a conceptual compliance analysis between OSM data and several tagging-guidelines using the OSHDB API. The results were visualized in a line chart, comparing the different compliance ratio over several months. The following analysis focuses on a spatial representation of the conceptual compliance. It is conducted for the “iD-editor” […]
Our new ohsome dashboard is another preview on what is and will be possible with our ohsome OpenStreetMap history analytics platform. Behind the scenes, we added support for the Apache Ignite big data framework and deployed an instance using the full OSM history data of whole Germany on Heidelberg University’s cloud computing infrastructure heiCLOUD. Apache Ignite is an open-source […]
Recently a consultancy and development agreement about OpenStreetMap Analytics Development has been reached with the World Bank in the context of the Open Cities Africa project and the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI). The main objective of this consultancy is to develop and implement new functionalities for […]
The growing use of crowdsourced geographic information (CGI) has prompted the employment of several methods for assessing information quality, which are aimed at addressing concerns on the lack of quality of the information provided by non‐experts. In a recently published work, we propose a taxonomy of methods for assessing the quality of CGI when no […]
Join the next ECSA webinar on “Citizen Science for monitoring urban landscape dynamics”! The European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) will host a webinar on the topic of “Citizen Science for monitoring urban landscape dynamics”. The webinar will include two talks: Assessing urban green space in Vienna (by Gebhard Banko and Barbara Birli from the Austrian Environmental […]
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 […]