GIScience Research Group Heidelberg becomes Member of the Missing Maps Project

GIScience Research Group Heidelberg becomes Member of the Missing Maps Project The GIScience Research Group at Heidelberg University is happy to announce their official membership in the Missing Maps Project . The objective of the Missing Maps Project is to map the most vulnerable places in the developing world, in order that international and local NGOs and individuals can use the maps and data to better respond to crises affecting the areas. Also it aims at supporting OpenStreetMap , specifically the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), in developing technologies, skills, workflows, and communities. The humanitarian mapping project is an open collaboration founded by Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT), Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), American Red Cross and the British Red Cross . Apart from these founding members, cartONG, the Netherlands RedCross and the Clinton Health Access Initiative support the project as formal members. Now the GIScience Research Group Heidelberg University with disastermappers heidelberg became the fourth additional member of the collaboration. GIScience Heidelberg is dedicated to support the work of the Missing Maps Project through several activities related to research & development, teaching & outreach (Mapathons) etc. The GIScience Research Group Heidelberg University has a long time experience regarding crowdsourcing and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). Thus, OSM data quality assessments and the usage of OSM data for (emergency) routing or in disaster management (e.g identifying critical infrastructures) are core topics of the research group since several years and will continue to be an active area in research, development and teaching. Since the launch of the Missing Maps project, the disastermappers heidelberg and GIScience Heidelberg organized several joint activities like Missing Maps Mapathons and practical workshops. These activities led to a closer cooperation with the Missing Maps team. For example a multi-step workflow was developed conceptually and implemented technically by the disastermappers heidelberg in cooperation with the MissingMaps team to facilitate the work of the volunteers. This is the base for the new mobile MicroTasking App being developed by Missing Maps right now. We are looking forward to working together with the Missing Maps Project putting the worlds vulnerable people on the map. http://www.missingmaps.org http://uni-heidelberg.de/gis Founders MembersGIScience Research Group Heidelberg becomes Member of the Missing Maps Project

Assessing the suitability of GlobeLand30 for mapping land cover in Germany

Assessing the suitability of GlobeLand30 for mapping land cover in Germany A new publication on the suitability of the new global land cover map of 2010 called GlobeLand30 for mapping European landscapes in particular, Germany and a cross comparison with crowdsourced and authoritative datasets. Abstract: Global land cover maps have been widely employed as the base layer for a number of applications including climate change, food security, water quality, biodiversity, change detection and environmental planning. Due to the importance of land cover, there is a pressing need to increase the temporal and spatial resolution of global land cover maps. A recent advance in this direction has been the GlobeLand30 dataset derived from Landsat imagery, which has been developed by the National Geomatics Center of China (NGCC). Although overall accuracy is greater than 80%, the NGCC would like help in assessing the accuracy of the product in different regions of the world. To assist in this process, this study compares the GlobeLand30 product with existing public and online datasets, i.e. CORINE, Urban Atlas, OpenStreetMap and ATKIS for Germany in order to assess overall and per class agreement. The results of the analysis reveal high agreement of up to 92% between these datasets and GlobeLand30 but that large disagreements for certain classes are evident, in particular wetlands. However, overall, GlobeLand30 is shown to be a useful product for characterizing land cover in Germany, and paves the way for further regional and national validation efforts. For further information check this out. Jokar Arsanjani, J., See, L., Tayyebi, A. (2016: forthcoming): Assessing the suitability of GlobeLand30 for mapping land cover in Germany, International Journal of Digital Earth, DOI:10.1080/17538947.2016.1151956.Assessing the suitability of GlobeLand30 for mapping land cover in Germany

Missing Maps Project

Amateur or Professional: Assessing the Expertise of Major Contributors in OpenStreetMap Based on Contributing Behaviors

Amateur or Professional: Assessing the Expertise of Major Contributors in OpenStreetMap Based on Contributing Behaviors Volunteered geographic information (VGI ) projects, such as OpenStreetMap (OSM ), provide an alternative way to produce geographic data. Research has showed that the resulting data in some areas are of decent quality, which guarantees their usability in various applications. Though these achievements are normally attributed to the huge heterogeneous community mainly consisting of amateurs, it is in fact a small percentage of major contributors who make nearly all contributions. In addition to their recent work on temporal analysis of contribution inequality in OpenStreetmap in an new paper, A. Yang et al. (2016) investigate the contributing behaviors of these contributors to deduce whether they are actually professionals. Various indicators are used to depict the behaviors on three themes: practice, skill and motivation, aiming to identify solid evidence for expertise. The case studies show that most major contributors in Germany, France and the United Kingdom are hardly amateurs, but are professionals instead. These contributors have rich experiences on geographical data editing, have a decent grasp of professional software and work on the project with enthusiasm and concentration. It is less unexpected that they can create geographic data of high quality. Three features distinguish this work from previous efforts. Firstly, there is a focus on major contributors, so the results can illustrate whether most OSM data come from professionals well. Secondly, they deliberately discuss expertise and use various guidelines to ensure inferential strength. Finally, though some classical indicators, such as total contributions and longevity, are still used in the work, more innovative indicators to depict expertise from various aspects are being introduced. The approach provides a possible way to examine the expertise of contributors when direct knowledge of individuals is not available, which usually is the case due to the anonymity of OSM users. The indicators introduced in this paper can also be useful for intrinsic OSM data quality analysis like Barron et al. 2013 or related work and recent frameworks . Data created by professional contributors should be more trusty and can be used as references to infer the quality of other data. Yang A., H. Fan, N. Jing (2016): Amateur or Professional: Assessing the Expertise of Major Contributors in OpenStreetMap Based on Contributing Behaviors. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information. 5(2), 21. doi:10.3390/ijgi5020021 Yang, A., H. Fan, N. Jing, Y. Sun, A. Zipf (2016): Temporal Analysis on Contribution Inequality in OpenStreetMap: A Comparative Study for Four Countries. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information. 5(1), 5. doi:10.3390/ijgi5010005 Barron, C., Neis, P. & Zipf, A. (2014): A Comprehensive Framework for Intrinsic OpenStreetMap Quality Analysis . Transactions in GIS, Volume 18, Issue 6, Pages: 877–895 Article first published online : 23 DEC 2013, DOI: 10.1111/tgis.12073. Jokar Arsanjani, J., Mooney, P., Helbich, M., Zipf, A., (2015): An exploration of future patterns of the contributions to OpenStreetMap and development of a Contribution Index , Transactions in GIS, Volume 19, Issue 6, Pages: 896–914. DOI: 10.1111/tgis.12139. Ballatore, A. and Zipf, A. (2015): A Conceptual Quality Framework for Volunteered Geographic Information . COSIT - CONFERENCE ON SPATIAL INFORMATION THEORY XII. October 12-16, 2015. Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 1-20.Amateur or Professional: Assessing the Expertise of Major Contributors in OpenStreetMap Based on Contributing Behaviors

2nd Call for Papers: Link-VGI Workshop @ AGILE Helsinki in June; Deadline April 25th.

2nd Call for Papers: Link-VGI Workshop @ AGILE Helsinki in June; Deadline April 25th. LINKing and analyzing Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) across different platforms Pre Conference Workshop at 19th AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Science 2016. Helsinki, June 14th 2016 Deadline for Call for Short Paper (AGILE short paper format): April 25th 2016 The number of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and social media platforms is continuously growing, providing massive datasets of georeferenced content that is either actively contributed (e.g. adding data to OSM, Mapillary, or Flickr) or collected through more passive modes (e.g. enabling geolocation in Twitter feeds). Whereas contribution behavior for individual crowdsourcing applications has already been extensively analyzed in the literature, it is less understood if and how users participate in several crowd sourcing activities. Hence several research questions relevant to a better understanding of community involvement in data contributions have evolved. These include for example, whether activity spaces in different sources are spatially co-located or spatially distinct for individual contributors, or whether contributor communities evolve across platforms. As an example, users started to cross-link data from different platforms, e.g. by mapping OSM point of interests (POIs) and street features (e.g. street lamps, sidewalk information) based on Mapillary photographs, or by tagging Flickr pictures with OSM tags. This workshop provides an opportunity for interested researchers to share ideas and findings on cross-platform data contributions. One portion in the workshop is dedicated to a hands-on session. In this session, basics of spatial data access through selected APIs and the extraction of summary statistics of the results will be illustrated. The workshop shall focus, but is not limited to, the following topics and areas of research: User contribution patterns and data sharing across multiple VGI and social media platforms Accessing and visualization of VGI data from various platforms Understand differences in spatial/temporal coverage of contributions to different platforms Understanding how data are linked across different VGI/social media platforms What types of communities are evolving and emerging from VGI/social media platforms Investigating how cross-linked data are used in real-world applications Describing the effects of the growing number of VGI and social media on data quality and user behavior Assess the quality of cross-linked VGI Identifying current research questions and an emerging research agenda Programme Committee Vyron (Byron) Antoniou, University College London, UK Padraig Corcoran, Cardiff University, UK Brent Hecht, University of Minnesota, United States Hartwig Hochmair, University of Florida, United States Peter Mooney, Maynooth University, Ireland Dieter Pfoser, George Mason University, United States Ross Purves, University of Zurich, Switzerland Georg Gartner, TU Vienna, Austria Enrico Steiger, University of Heidelberg, Germany Jamal Jokar Arsanjani, University of Heidelberg, Germany Bernd Resch, University of Salzburg, Austria Adam Rousell, University of Heidelberg, Germany Hongchao Fan, University of Heidelberg, Germany Alexander Zipf, University of Heidelberg, Germany IMPORTANT DATES April 25th 2016 - Call for short papers ends. Review process begins. May 9th 2016 - Review process ends - Program committee decides on selected papers - authors notified. May 23rd 2016 - Camera ready copies due May 30th 2016 - Abstracts of selected papers available on the Link-VGI Website June 14th 2016 - Link-VGI Workshop Further Information and Submission Details can be found at the Workshop WebSite: http://www.geog.uni-heidelberg.de/gis/link_vgi.html2nd Call for Papers: Link-VGI Workshop @ AGILE Helsinki in June; Deadline April 25th.

Open Position GIScience HD: Navigation, Routing & mobile LBS with OpenStreetMap

Open Position GIScience HD: Navigation, Routing & mobile LBS with OpenStreetMap Stellenausschreibung Geoinformatik, Universität Heidelberg Navigation, Routing & LBS mit OSM (VGI) Am Lehrstuhl Geoinformatik der Universität Heidelberg ist baldmöglichst eine Stelle als Wissenschaftl. Mitarbeiter (100%, TVL) - gerne als PostDoc - zu besetzen. Die relevanten Themengebiete beinhalten insbesondere Forschung und Entwicklung in min. einem der folgenden Bereiche (Schwerpunktsetzung möglich): • Navigation (In- / Outdoor) mit OpenStreetMap (OSM) • (Spezial)Routing mit OSM • Mobile Anwendungen & Location Based Services (LBS) mit VGI/OSM • Qualitätsmanagement in VGI, insb. OSM • Datenmodellierung, -anreicherung und –fusion in VGI/ OSM Wir bieten eine attraktive Stelle in einem interdisziplinär ausgerichteten dynamischen Team und in einem hochaktuellen Forschungsgebiet, welches die hervorragende Gelegenheit der Weiterqualifikation ermöglicht. Der Lehrstuhl Geoinformatik wird an der Universität Heidelberg seit 2010 aufgebaut. Er ist am Geographischen Institut angesiedelt und Mitglied im Interdisziplinären Zentrum für Wissenschaftliches Rechnen (IWR) der Universität und Gründungsmitglied des Heidelberg Center for the Environment (HCE). Die Exzellenz-Universität Heidelberg bietet in besonderem Maße ein anregendes interdisziplinäres Forschungsumfeld und umfassende Möglichkeiten zur Weiterbildung. Wir erwarten ein überdurchschnittlich abgeschlossenes Universitätsstudium (gerne mit Promotion) in einem der Fächer Geoinformatik, Informatik, Geographie oder ähnlichen Disziplinen. Erforderlich sind ausgezeichnete Methodenkompetenz, technologische Kenntnisse und Forschungserfahrungen im Bereich Geoinformatik / GIScience, insbesondere in mindestens einem der oben genannten Gebiete (Routing, Navigation, VGI Analyse, Geodatenqualität, Softwareentwicklung (v.a. Java bzw. JavaScript), Datenintegration etc.), als auch die Fähigkeit zum selbständigen wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten und Projektdurchführung, sowie zur Teamarbeit. Die Stelle ist baldmöglichst zu besetzen und zunächst auf 3 Jahre befristet mit der Möglichkeit der Verlängerung. Aussagekräftige Bewerbungsunterlagen (Zeugnisse, Publikationen, Referenzprojekte, etc.) senden Sie baldmöglichst - bis spätestens 31.03.2016 - bzw. solange bis die Position besetzt ist elektronisch an bettina.knorr@geog.uni-heidelberg.de. Die Vergütung erfolgt nach TV-L. Schwerbehinderte werden bei gleicher Eignung vorrangig eingestellt. PDF http://www.geog.uni-heidelberg.de/institut/jobs.html OpenRouteService.orgOpen Position GIScience HD: Navigation, Routing & mobile LBS with OpenStreetMap

Report on the 2nd year evaluation meeting of CAP4Access project

Report on the 2nd year evaluation meeting of CAP4Access project The second year evaluation meeting of CAP4Access project took place on February 17th, 2016 at European Commission in Brussels. Representatives of all project partners presented the results and work-in-progress of their tasks for the second year of the project, followed by questions from two external reviewers appointed by the European Commission. From CAP4Access team at GIScience group of Heidelberg University, Stefan Hahmann , Adam Rousell and Amin Mobasheri participated in the evaluation meeting. Stefan gave two presentations concerning the activities and future plans for “raising awareness and pilot test plans for Heidelberg” as well as technical presentation of the routing part of “routing and navigation service”. Adam completed Stefan’s presentation by providing the current state of navigation service as well as a seperate presentation on the development and usage of obstacle tagging service. Furthermore, Amin gave a presentation regarding “Developed tools for OpenStreetMap data quality assessment”. Besides Heidelberg team, other project partners also presented their works during the past year. All presentations included discussions regarding the future steps that are planned to be done in the final year of the project. After all the presentations, questions and comments from reviewers, the reviewers gave fruitful feedback and comments and shared their positive opinions regarding the work that was done in the second year of project. The final result is to be announced later when the reviewers submit their written reports to the European Commission.Report on the 2nd year evaluation meeting of CAP4Access project

Save the Date: Workshop “Open Data”, (OSM in disaster management), Heidelberg, 15. April 2016

Save the Date: Workshop “Open Data”, (OSM in disaster management), Heidelberg, 15. April 2016 As a follow-up of the IWR HGS Modellierungstag on “Open Data ” from last December IWR HGS MathComp will organize an additional Workshop on “Open Data” in Heidelberg on April 15th. Again GIScience Heidelberg as well as GeoNet.MRN will participate with contributions. GIScience Heidelberg will present potentials and tools for the usage of OpenStreetMap in the field of Disaster Management . Stay tuned for further information.Save the Date: Workshop “Open Data”, (OSM in disaster management), Heidelberg, 15. April 2016

GeoNet.MRN :: Next Business Breakfast at Assecio BERIT, 08.03.2016

GeoNet.MRN :: Next Business Breakfast at Assecio BERIT, 08.03.2016 Nächstes Business-Frühstück am 08.03.2016 bei Asseco BERIT Im März lädt Sie das Netzwerk Geoinformation GeoNet.MRN recht herzlich zum nächsten Business Frühstück 2016 ein! Dieses Mal besuchen wir eines unserer Mitglieder, die Asseco BERIT GmbH in Mannheim. Termin: 08.03.2016, 8:30 - 10.00 Uhr Ort: Asseco BERIT GmbH , Mundenheimer Straße 55, 68219 Mannheim Teilnahme: Kostenlos. Bitte melden Sie sich bei Interesse bis zum 04.03.16 auf dem GeoNet.MRN Portal für die Veranstaltung an! Über Asseco Berit Asseco BERIT ist als 100 %ige Tochter der Asseco Gruppe das Kompetenzzentrum für Betriebsmittelinformationssysteme, GIS und operative Asset Management Systeme in Deutschland, Österreich und den angrenzenden Ländern. Die traditionellen Hauptanwender finden sich bei Ver- und Entsorgungsunternehmen sowie in Industriebetrieben. GeoNet.MRN Akteure aus Unternehmen, Forschungseinrichtungen und Verwaltungen der Rhein-Neckar-Region gründeten 2012 den gemeinnützigen Verein „Geoinformation der Metropolregion Rhein-Neckar e.V.“ (GeoNet.MRN). Die übergeordneten Ziele des Netzwerkes sind Akteure zu vernetzen, den Informationsaustausch zu fördern, die Nutzungsmöglichkeiten und Zugänglichkeit von Geoinformation zu verbessern und das breite Bewusstsein für die Bedeutung von Geoinformation in der Digitalen Gesellschaft zu schärfen.GeoNet.MRN :: Next Business Breakfast at Assecio BERIT, 08.03.2016

Better Maps for the Weather Portal Kachelmannwetter

Better Maps for the Weather Portal Kachelmannwetter The goal of our new project with Kachelmannwetter.com is to provide specialized maps based on OpenStreetMap data using the cartographic framework MapSurfer.NET which currently serves the map service at uni-heidelberg.de/openmapsurfer . To achieve the project goals, we will design a brand new map style and add several extensions to the framework. Stay tuned for the result!Better Maps for the Weather Portal Kachelmannwetter

HeiMAP - a virtual research platform for historic maps in the humanities

HeiMAP - a virtual research platform for historic maps in the humanities Recently a new project “HeiMAP ” has been funded at Heidelberg University. The goal of HeiMAP is the development of an online research platform with modular tools and services for project and data management especially for the collaborative work with and on predominantly historical maps and geographic information in the humanities. Maps contain multiple layers of information about past and contemporary geographies. To make scientific use of the embedded geographic information interdisciplinary collaborative work with high demands on internal communication, efficiency and interdisciplinary multimedia data management are required. The envisioned virtual research environment shall allow researchers from the humanities to work on digitized (historical) maps and spatial data. It shall provide the possibility to find solutions for a number of urgent problems in humanities research questions using geographical information: orientation in pre-modern space through exploitation of historical maps, active research on maps, working together online instead of working with desktop applications with high entry barriers and accessibility. By focusing on core functions and target group-oriented documentation, close connection with the services of the university library, rights management and proof of provenance, standard compliance of the developed geodata by assisted data modeling, long-term storage, propagation and reimportation of records with respect to new questions. The core of the project is a web-based Geographic Information System (WebGIS). The modular design of the system and compliance with international standards ensure a flexible connection to a web portal, which connects several tools and services, such as database systems for storing the metadata (with interfaces to external databases), various communication and organization tools, a central data store, a forum and various project managemenent tools. The inter-site and secure use of all tools is guaranteed by the identity management from bwIDM. The GIS module is connected to the Heidelberg research data repository heiDATA, whereby the publication of scientific data can be done (with DOI), thus improving the reuse possibilities of scientific results. Partners at Heidelberg Universit y include: - Computing Center (URZ) Heidelberg University - Exzellence Cluster “Asia & Europe in a Global Context” - Institut für Fränkisch-Pfälzische Geschichte und Landeskunde - GIScience Research Group, Institute of Geography - University library Heidelberg External partner: - Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg.HeiMAP - a virtual research platform for historic maps in the humanities

This Wednesday Talks on Travel Impedance and Dynamics of Health-Related Tweets by Prof. Eric Delmelle

This Wednesday Talks on Travel Impedance and Dynamics of Health-Related Tweets by Prof. Eric Delmelle The semester has come to an end but still we are happy to invite you this to two open colloquium talks by Dr. Eric Delmelle, Associate Professor , Department of Geography & Earth Sciences, University North Carolina Charlotte about the two interesting topics: “Evaluating Travel Impedance Agreement among Online Road Network Data Providers” & “Visualizing the dynamics of health-related tweets: opportunities and computational challenges” The talks will be on this Wednesday Feb 17, 2016 4.15 pm-5.15.pm Hörsaal Berliner Straße 48 , Institute of Geography, Heidelberg University. Evaluating Travel Impedance Agreement among Online Road Network Data Providers Online mapping providers offer unprecedented access to spatial data and analytical tools; however the number of analytical queries that can be requested is usually limited. As such, providers using Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) offer a viable alternative, given that the quality of the underlying spatial data is adequate. In this presentation, I will present results of an analysis aimed at assessing the agreement in travel distance estimates between Mapquest Open–which embraces OpenStreetMap (OSM) data, a VGI dataset-, and two other popular commercial providers, namely Google Maps™ and ArcGIS™ Online. We use a routing service Application Program Interface (API), to estimate travel impedance and the average number of OSM contributors. Origin-destination pairs are simulated for the state of North Carolina, U.S.A., and travel estimates reported for each of the providers. Results suggest (1) a strong correlation among all three road network providers, (2) agreement improves with increasing route distances and (3) decreases in areas with denser road network as providers may select different routes from a larger number of potential paths. Most importantly, travel estimates from Mapquest Open exhibit stronger similarity with both commercial providers when the average number of OSM contributors along the selected path is larger. Visualizing the dynamics of health-related tweets: opportunities and computational challenges Twitter, a form of social media, provides endless opportunities for public health. Information on disease symptoms, generated by twitter users, may alert health officials on the risk posed by a certain disease before it can be detected and officially confirmed in a lab. Certain tweets are georeferenced, and coupled with their temporal stamps, they have the potential to be used for space-time monitoring of diseases. This is particularly important to better understand disease dynamics, such as seasonality, direction, intensity and risk of diffusion to new regions. In this presentation, I will focus on the computational challenges associated to infer meaningful information from twitter related data, with an application to pollen-related tweets. I will then discuss a space-time framework to visualize the intensity of collected tweets in both space and time. I will discuss the impact of positional, temporal and attribute accuracy on the detection of space-time clusters from health-related tweets.This Wednesday Talks on Travel Impedance and Dynamics of Health-Related Tweets by Prof. Eric Delmelle