HeiGIT Technology

The Sketch Map Tool simplifies participatory mapping, by facilitating the creation and digitalisation of paper-based maps, the so-called SketchMaps. This low-tech solution enables the offline collection of local knowledge and perceptions with pens and paper maps. Every Sketch Map contains a basemap with OpenStreetMap data or satellite imagery, which provides a scale and orientation. Upon uploading pictures of marked maps, the tool automatically digitizes and georeferences the markings, making it downloadable for integration into Geographic Information Systems. The Sketch Map Tool bridges the gab between widely used, analogue mapping and digital analysis and fosters community involvement and the usability of gained results.

openrouteservice.org offers routing services based on user-generated, communally collected, free geographic data from OpenStreetMap. It is more than just routing, the openrouteservice also offers accessibility analyses with isochrones, distance matrices and specific search capabilities regarding POIs. This personalized service offers a huge range of possibilities to users. Other openrouteservice features include wheelchair routing as well as noise-avoiding and heat-stress avoiding routing.

The ongoing HeiGIT project openrouteservice for Disaster Management is a collaboration between the openrouteservice Team and the Geoinformation for Humanitarian Aid Team. The goal is to provide reliable and up-to-date data of the infrastructure network in disaster-stricken areas by improving both quantity and quality of OSM road network data, by providing dynamic real-time information, as well as an offline mobile client tool, and much more. We focus on the humanitarian aspect by improving situational awareness, especially regarding the (changing) conditions of the road network during disasters.

The route planning app helps you to answer the question: “Where is the closest Covid-19 vaccination center and what is the best way to get there?” by suggesting routes to the nearest vaccination center. It is built on the basis of HeiGIT’s openrouteservice technology and uses data from OpenStreetMap (OSM). The application also offers written navigation instructions and further information about vaccination centers. It works online and can be used through modern web browsers on a PC, or on newer smartphones and tablets.

The ohsome History Explorer (ohsomeHeX) allows the spatio-temporal exploration of OSM data on a global scale by using the ohsome API to aggregate the data of selected features into a set of globe spanning hexagonal grids in a monthly resolution. This allows for the analysis of the evolution of the data, provides insight into the quality and visual exploration of the history of OSM Data, and presents an opportunity to uncover interesting semantic connections.

The ohsome API is a HeiGIT technology based on the OSHDB that is under continuous development to improve its features. It is a REST-based API that enables extraction and analysis of the whole history of OpenStreetMap’s data via HTTP requests. The data are avaiable as CSV, JSON or GeoJSON to make OpenStreetMap’s data history more easily accessible for various kinds of data analytics tasks on a global scale.

OQAPI is a service that end users, i.e. humanitarian organisations and public administration, can use to access information on the quality of OSM data for their specific region and use-case. It is a web-based application that builds upon HeiGIT’s OSM analysis infrastructure ohsome, but also provides an API and command line interface. Further, it functions as a data integration tool that brings together a variety of intrinsic and extrinsic OSM data quality metrics.

The ohsome dashboard, a HeiGIT technology building upon the ohsome API, is a dashboard that allows you to perform analyses of OpenStreetMap’s full-history data without the need of programming skills by generating accurate statistics and plotting them directly in the dashboard. Statistics about the historical development of OpenStreetMap data can be selected for any arbitrary region or time period, custom filtering of all available OpenStreetMap tags and types can be applied, and results can also be grouped in various different ways.

The ohsome-py package helps you to extract and analyse OpenStreetMap history data using the ohsome API and python. It handles queries to the ohsome API and converts its responses to Pandas and GeoPandas data frames to facilitate easy data handling and analysis.

The ohsomeNow Stats was developped as a part of the long-term cooperation with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). This dashboard provides users with real-time, global-scale statistics on mapping activity within OpenStreetMap (OSM). It offers insights into key metrics such as the number of contributors, total map edits, added buildings, and road length for a specified time range and OSM Changesets hashtag filter. The data obtained from ohsomeNow Stats is updated in near-realtime and instantly reflected on the dashboard. Users can utilize this tool to report mapping statistics for any time range, starting from 2009-04-21.

The GIScience project ohsome2label, with support from HeiGIT, uses historical OpenStreetMap objects as machine learning training samples to create a flexible label preparation for satellite machine learning applications. With the help of HeiGIT’s ohsome API all kinds of geospatial objects may be retrieved from OSM.

ohsome2X is an opensource tool used to create the data for time-series maps of OSM’s historic development. Internally, we also use the tool to create time-series data for HeiGIT’s ohsome OSM History Explorer ohsomeHeX. With ohsome2X, you will be able to create your own OSM History Stats Maps, for your areas of interests. The tool uses HeiGIT’s ohsome API to query the relevant statistics and combines the results with any input of polygons (admin areas, regular grids, etc). For small tasks, you can upload a GeoJSON; for larger tasks you can link to a PostGIS DB and process your data iteratively in digestible chunks.

The web application Open Healthcare Access Map combines data on healthcare infrastructure and motorized mobility to measure accessibility. Through the combination of accessibility and population distribution, insights on travel time to healthcare facilities, using HeiGIT’S openrouteservice, and population coverage at different scales for a variety of countries are provided. The information is aggregated on administrative levels and hexagons. These differences in healthcare supply are to be revealed spatially. This app is intended as a prototype to showcase the potentials of free and open geodata within the public health domain. Future milestones are, among others, the delineation of facility level catchment areas and incorporation of data quality measures.

MapSwipe is an opensource mobile application that aims to make mapping around the world more coordinated and efficient. Since its start in 2015, MapSwipe has scaled to 29,000 users who have mapped 1,300,000 km². MapSwipe is an opensource project that is still ongoing and uses HeiGIT technologies. It is built and maintained by volunteers with the support of the British Red Cross, the GIScience Research Group of Heidelberg, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and the organization Médecins Sans Frontières. The team at the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) and the GIScience Research Group at Heidelberg University have shaped MapSwipe’s development from the very beginning by designing the crowdsourcing approach behind MapSwipe, providing the tools needed to manage such a global project, and by making use of the data in a timely manner. Our work ensures that volunteer efforts can turn into meaningful data for humanitarian organizations.

Humanitarian OSM Stats is an ongoing HeiGIT project, which aims at presenting statistics and graphs concerning mapping in OpenStreetMap (OSM) for humanitarian purposes by combining the analysis of data from the HOT Tasking Manager, population data sets, and OSM History data using the HeiGIT technology OSHDB.

The OSHDB enables the investigation of the evolution of data quantity and the contributions of this data to the OpenStreetMap project. The OSHDB has been designed for efficient storage of and access to OpenStreetMap’s data history. In order to ensure the scalability of the system, the OSHDB builds on a partitioning schema, which allows distributed data storage and parallel execution of computations. An API, the OSHDB API implemented by HeiGIT, provides an interface to the OSHDB in the Java programming language.