Amin Mobasheri

Heidelberg University · GIScience research group

This book is mainly focused on two themes: transportation and smart city applications. Open geospatial science and technology is an increasingly important paradigm that offers the opportunity to promote the democratization of geographical information, the transparency of governments and institutions, as well as social, economic and urban opportunit...

Open geospatial data and tools are an increasingly important paradigm offering the opportunity to promote the democratization of geographical information, the transparency of governments and institutions, as well as social, economic and environmental opportunities. During the past decade, developments in the area of open geospatial data and open-so...

Over the past decade, open source software has become widely accepted across governments, industries and academia. The geospatial domain is no exception and this trend is also reflected in geospatial research and practice. Nowadays, governments and stakeholders from the business sector both participate and promote open geospatial science including...

Nowadays, governments from around the world and stakeholders from the business sector both participate to and promote open geospatial science. Governments increasingly provide free access to various types of geospatial data as they realize its potential to foster economic, social, urban and environmental opportunities. Concrete projects based on op...

This paper is the editorial of the Special Issue “Open Source Geospatial Software”, which features 10 published papers. The editorial introduces the concept of openness and, within the geospatial context, declines it into the three main components of software, data and standards. According to this classification, the papers published in the Special...

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 is one of the successful examples of such international-wide research projects that aims to improve the accessibility of people with restricted m...

Data quality and fitness for purpose can be assessed by data quality measures. Existing ontologies of data quality dimensions reflect, among others, which aspects of data quality are assessed and the mechanisms that lead to poor data quality. An understanding of which source of information is used to judge about data quality and fitness for purpose...

OpenStreetMap and other Volunteered Geographic Information datasets have been explored in the last years, with the aim of understanding how their meaning is rendered, of assessing their quality, and of understanding the community-driven process that creates and maintains the data. Research mostly focuses either on the data themselves while ignoring...

Tailored routing and navigation services utilized by wheelchair users require certain information about sidewalk geometries and their attributes to execute efficiently. Except some minor regions/cities, such detailed information is not present in current versions of crowdsourced mapping databases including OpenStreetMap. CAP4Access European project...

Crowdsourcing (geo-) information and participatory GIS are among the current hot topics in research and industry. Various projects are implementing participatory sensing concepts within their workflow in order to benefit from the power of volunteers, and improve their product quality and efficiency. Wheelmap is a crowdsourcing platform where volunt...

Finding relevant geospatial information is increasingly critical because of the growing volume of geospatial data available within the emerging “Big Data” era. Users are expecting that the availability of massive datasets will create more opportunities to uncover hidden information and answer more complex queries. This is especially the case with r...

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has been used to complement or substitute authoritative data in flood management domain. The main issue regarding the use of volunteered information is to estimate its quality, mainly because it may suffer from heterogeneous quality. Therefore, several methods have been developed in the past few years in ord...

As it is widely accepted, cycling tends to produce health benefits and reduce air pollution. Policymakers encourage people to use bikes by improving cycling facilities as well as developing bicycle-sharing systems (BSS). It is increasingly interesting to investigate how environmental factors influence the cycling behavior of users of bicycle-sharin...

Nowadays, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has increasingly gained attractiveness to both amateur users and professionals. Using data generated from the crowd has become a hot topic for several application domains including transportation. However, there are concerns regarding the quality of such datasets. As one of the most famous crowdsou...

With the development of information and communications technology, user-generated content and crowdsourced data are playing a large role in studies of transport and public health. Recently, Strava, a popular website and mobile app dedicated to tracking athletic activity (cycling and running), began offering a data service called Strava Metro, desig...

Although OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a widely used crowd generated spatial dataset, it can be difficult for novice users to enter data in a way that conforms to those data already present. It is often the case however that it is these novice users who have a more invested need for relevant data to be present within OSM, such as is the case with users wi...

The increased development of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and its potential role in GIScience studies raises questions about the resulting data quality. Several studies address VGI quality from various perspectives like completeness, positional accuracy, consistency, etc. They mostly have consensus on the heterogeneity of data quality....

With the ubiquity of advanced web technologies and location-sensing hand held devices, citizens regardless of their knowledge or expertise, are able to produce spatial information. This phenomenon is known as volunteered geographic information (VGI). During the past decade VGI has been used as a data source supporting a wide range of services, such...

Detailed geospatial data about the accessibility of places, buildings and transportation network features is required to improve urban planning with respect to accessibility and to assist persons with limited mobility or special needs in planning their travels. However, in official data sources or in crowdsourcing platforms such as OpenStreetMap, s...

Landmarks are an important part of portraying navigational instructions, especially to pedestrians. Whether an object can be seen as a landmark or not is often dependent on its visual characteristics. However, in data sources such as OSM, such information is rarely available and so cannot be used for the identification of landmarks. The ‘type’ of f...

Data on population at building level is required for various purposes. However, to protect privacy, government population data is aggregated. Population estimates at finer scales can be obtained through areal interpolation, a process where data from a first spatial unit system is transferred to another system. Areal interpolation can be conducted w...

The rapidly growing number of crowdsourcing platforms generates huge volumes of volunteered geographic information (VGI), which requires analysis to reveal their potential. The huge volumes of data appear as an opportunity to improve various applications, including routing and navigation services. How existing techniques for dealing with Big Data c...

Data on population at building level is required for various purposes. However, to protect privacy, government population data is aggregated. Population estimates at finer scales can be obtained through areal interpolation, a process where data from a first spatial unit system is transferred to another system. Areal interpolation can be conducted w...

Evaluating the quality of geospatial dataset is an important aspect that needs to be considered in order to improve the quality of results in any project. This issue has become even more critical these days due to the ever growing platforms and services that produce and share Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in the world wide domain. In thi...

The rapidly growing number of crowdsourcing platforms generates huge volumes of volunteered geographic information (VGI), which requires analysis to reveal their potential. The huge volumes of data appear as an opportunity to improve various applications, including routing and navigation services. How existing techniques for dealing with Big Data c...

Over the past decades, World Wide Web technology has developed greatly. One of the most important outcomes of this technology is to share data in a worldwide domain. A considerable amount of available data have spatial components and are hence called spatial data. The level of quality that spatial datasets conform plays an important role in their r...

Use of relevant geo-information is one of the important issues for performing different tasks and processes in disaster response phase. In order to save time and cost, services could be employed for integrating and extracting relevant up-to-date geo-information. For this purpose, semantics of geo-information should be explicitly defined. This paper...