Abstract:
User Generated Geographic Information on the Web provides more and more global datasets of unprecedented volume and spatial and temporal resolution. This poses challenges to spatio-temporal analytics of such data. In particular the temporal dimension becomes more and more important for the understanding, quality-assessment and usage of this new type of geographic information. Therefore we need to develop new approaches for data management, processing and analysing of big VGI data based on big data technologies. These are applying e.g. in-memory databases and cloud computing. Examples will be given based on use cases for quality analysis and improvement of OpenStreetMap (OSM) history data, as well as further crowdsourced GI from mobile apps from the the disaster management and humanitarian aid domain like MapSwipe. Several Web-based analytics platforms are being developed and will be introduced that help to quality assess the generated data based on intrinsic quality indicators for VGI. Also Deep Learning techniques employing GPU-based computing plattforms are used for the derivation and prediction of specific data layers from these sources. Further examples of the generation of enhanced data products from the Social Web and VGI for innovative routing applications will be presented. This includes both how to derive and improve information related to landcover-landuse from VGI sources such as OSM, but also specific environmental data and attributes that represent health-related indicators for urban stress.

Prof. Dr. Alexander Zipf is chair of GIScience (Geoinformatics) at Heidelberg University (Department of Geography) since late 2009. He is member of the Centre for Scientific Computing (IWR), the Heidelberg Center for Cultural Heritage and PI at the Heidelberg graduate school MathComp. He is also founding member of the Heidelberg Center for the Environment (HCE). From 2012-2014 he was Managing Director of the Department of Geography, Heidelberg University. In 2011-2012 he acted as Vice Dean of the Faculty for Chemistry and Geosciences, Heidelberg University. Since 2012 he is speaker of the graduate school “CrowdAnalyser - Spatio-temporal Analysis of User-generated Content“. He is also member of the editorial board of several further journals and organized a set of conferences and workshops. 2012-2015 he was regional editor of the ISI Journal Transactions in GIS (Wiley).Before coming to Heidelberg he led the Chair of Cartography at Bonn University and earlier was Professor for Applied Computer Science and Geoinformatics at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Germany. He has a background in Mathematics and Geography from Heidelberg University and finished his PHD at the European Media Laboratory EML in Heidelberg where he was the first PhD student. There he also conducted further research as a PostDoc for 3 years.