Amin MobasheriUniversität Heidelberg · GIScience research group
Amin Mobasheri
Dr. rer. nat.
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30
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1,257
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
March 2013 - June 2017
Publications
Publications (30)
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...
![Figure 3. Census output areas in Glasgow (source: DATA.GOV.UK [52]).](profile/Yeran-Sun-2/publication/314718925/figure/fig2/AS:667625780678659@1536185798202/Census-output-areas-in-Glasgow-source-DATAGOVUK-52_Q320.jpg)
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...
![Figure 1 Data quality evaluation process flow (adopted from [10]).](publication/286161020/figure/fig1/AS:469702376988673@1488997181560/Data-quality-evaluation-process-flow-adopted-from-10_Q320.jpg)
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...
Projects
Projects (5)
The last decade has seen a rapid growth in open source geospatial software and data developments. Open geospatial data applies the principles of free and openness to geospatial information, allowing communities to collaborate on a data product. Applying the lessons learned in the open source industry to geo-data collection and maintenance has led to a new generation of data products. This is more than publishing information for free access. Open data provides a mechanism for participants to contribute back as equal partners in data collection and review. Nowadays, open data play a fundamental role especially that data science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods are becoming so pivotal in science development. Examples of successful open geo-data platforms include OpenStreetMap and Natural Earth, to name a few.
Open Education applies the principles of open source to the creation of teaching materials allowing organizations to share syllabus materials with the aims of reducing costs and reaching a wider audience. Promoting collaboration between involved parties is central to open education. As the Open Education Consortium says: “sharing is probably the most basic characteristic of education: education is sharing knowledge, insights and information with others, upon which new knowledge, skills, ideas and understanding can be built.”
Free and Open Source Geospatial Software addresses the design, implementation, characterization, and use of open tools for geospatial and environmental analysis, mapping, remote sensing, and spatial information science. Open standards are the key to developing sustainable software. Open standards promote interoperability between applications, organizations, and fields of endeavor. Open standards are key tools allowing geospatial practitioners to work together, with the added benefit of avoiding technology lock-in.
Finally, Open Science combines all these ideas by both sharing the data used to support a conclusion, alongside the code and/or the parameters used with an open source software for carrying out the analysis. This leads to the development of innovative concepts and standards based on free and open source software for scientific global inter-disciplinary research, as well as for education and business projects.
We invite original research contributions on all aspects of open source geospatial science, software, and education, as well as its applications. We particularly encourage submissions focusing on the following themes:
• Architectures and frameworks for open source software and data
• The use of open source geospatial software and data, in and for scientific research
• Open source implementations and Open SDI
• Human computer interfaces and usability in and around Open GI systems
• Use of Open Data and Big Data in research projects
• Open data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Geospatial Applications
• Open Geospatial Data quality
• Open Source Software quality
• Open Geospatial Standards
• Crowdsourced Geographic Information and Participatory GIS
• Teaching geospatial sciences with open source solutions and open data
• Open Source GIS application use cases: environment, climate change, health, energy, government, participatory GIS, location based services, etc.
Important Dates:
Abstracts Due: 15/02/2019 (by email to: a.mobasheri@uni-heidelberg.de)
Approved Abstracts: 01/03/2019 (put as planned papers online)
Manuscripts Due: 31/08/2019
Decision to Authors: 15/11/2019
Final Papers Due: 31/01/2020
For more information please check the CfP here:
https://wol-prod-cdn.literatumonline.com/pb-assets/assets/14679671/Open%20Geospatial%20Science%20Software%20and%20Education.pdf
Open geospatial data and tools are 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 environmental opportunities. During the past decade, developments in the area of open geospatial data and open source geospatial software have greatly increased. The Open Source GIS research community believes that combining free and open software, open data, as well as open standards, leads to the creation of a sustainable ecosystem for accelerating new discoveries to help solve global cross-disciplinary societal challenges, from climate change mitigation to sustainable cities.
In this project we aim to present research contributions on all aspects of open source geospatial software and its applications, particularly focusing on urban and environmental studies.
The works of this project will get published as a thematic collection. You may find the articles below. Enjoy reading them and feel free to get in touch with authors of the articles for joint-collaborations!
The objective of the CAP4Access project is to develop and pilot-test methods and tools for collectively gathering and sharing information about accessibility of public spaces. The background for the project is that Europe needs to become more accessible. Too often, buildings and ways cannot be easily reached and passed by everyone. This does not only concern wheelchair users but also seniors with walking aids, parents with pushchairs, frail patients - it concerns anyone whose walking ability is permanently or temporarily limited. This applies to many millions of people in Europe. Online maps offer great opportunities to indicate which places and ways are accessible and which ones are not. Locations and routes on maps can be enhanced with accessibility related data, commented, and visualised with photos. These possibilities are not yet widely used, however, and their full potential still needs to be reaped. CAP4access works towards this aim. Four test sites in Vienna (Austria), London South Bank (United Kingdom), Elche (Spain) and Heidelberg (Germany) will produce insights about using online maps for enhanced accessibility.
