Thema: Im Rahmen der gemeinsamen IFGIcopter und ILÖK UAV Initiative werden  kontinuierlich vegetationsspezifische Fernerkundungsdaten unterschiedlichster UAV-Sensoren (Drohnen) aufgenommen und ausgewertet. Besondere Schwerpunkte sind die Erfassung und Analyse von Vegetationsmustern, Vitalitätsparametern und inversiver Arten mittels multispektraler UAS Daten. In diesem Kontext spielen die Datenverarbeitung und Visualisierung (auch 3D) mittels verschiedenster geoinformatischer Werkzeuge (GIS, kommerzielle Software, Web-Tools und Eigenprogrammierungen etc.) eine große Rolle. Wer Interesse an einer interdisziplinären Fragestellung in diesem Bereich hat, wende sich an die beiden Ansprechpartner [2017].

Ansprechpartner: Torsten Prinz / Jan Lehmann

Background

Many disciplines need detailed information data about the number of inhabitants residing in small geographic areas, e.g. for interventional/ preventional public health studies or in the field of disaster risk management. The aim of this BSc thesis is to disaggregate the population data at community level (LAU 2) from the Regierungsbezirk Münster (study area) with the EEA Fast Track Service Precursor on Land Monitoring raster data for spatial cancer surveillance. The epidemiological cancer registry of NRW supplies data of geocoded cancer cases with the aim of modeling a spatial cancer incidence surface. However, there is a lack of an appropriate spatial representation of the population at risk (or background population) from which the cancer cases arise. Therefore more precise estimates of the population in the Regierungsbezirk Münster should obtained with the approach of Steinnocher et al. (2011).

Methods

The EEA raster dataset is for built-up areas with a continuous degree of imperviousness ranging from 0-100% in spatial resolution of 1 ha (Aubrecht et al. 2013). Steinnocher et al. (2011) developed a method to estimate the population density based on the housing density from this raster data. The method is based on the assumption that the population density is proportional to housing density. In a first step all sealed surface areas without residential function must mask out with additional data (e.g. open street map and Corine Land cover data). The remaining areas are used together with the population data as input for Steinnocher’s disaggregating approach. Afterwards the obtained population estimates should be evaluated with population reference data (e.g. population data at census tract level).

This BSc thesis should implement and evaluate the approach of Steinnocher at al. (2011) in R. It is an interdisciplinary project between the Institute of Geoinformatics and the Institute for Epidemiology and Social Medicine (Medical Faculty).

Contact

Dorothea Lemke (dorothea.lemke@uni-muenster.de)

Edzer Pebesma (edzer.pebesma@uni-muenster.de)

References

Aubrecht C, Ozceylan D, Steinnocher K, Freire S: Multi-level geospatial modelling of human exposure patterns and vulnerability indicators. Nat Hazards 2013, 68(1):147-163.

Steinnocher K., Köstl M., Weichselbaum J. (2011): Kleinräumige Bevölkerungsmodellierung für Europa – Räumliche Disaggregation auf Basis des Versiegelungsgrades. Strobl J., Blaschke T., Griesebner G. (Hrsg): Angewandte Geoinformatik 2011, Beiträge zum 23. AGIT-Symposium, 6.-8. Juli 2011.

CORINE land cover data: http://www.epa.ie/soilandbiodiversity/soils/land/corine/ (last access 09/20/13)

Fast Track Service Precursor on Land monitoring: http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/eea-fast-track-service-precursor-on-land-monitoring-degree-of-soil-sealing (last access 09/20/13)

The model web envisions the publication of standardized processes as web services. These services can be combined, i.e. chained or orchestrated, to integrate distributed resources, such as specific knowledge, data, or computing infrastructure. The most common standard for executing processes operating on geospatial data is the OGC Web Processing Service (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wps). Besides being a language for statistical computing an graphics, i.e. a GIS, R (http://r-project.org/) can also be used as a programming environment for scripting and data mangement. Therefore in this thesis, a concept shall be created how to integrate a WPS client application into R to call server-based WPS processes from R scripts. This task comprises a mapping of WPS concepts to R. These concepts at least comprise the WPS operations for process description and control as well as the input and output data structures, which have to be represented by appropritate R objects and functions. The concept is implemented in a prototypical R extension package (http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html) and demonstrated with two partially WPS-based orchestrated workflows: (i) a classical GIS algorithm for vector data manipulation (e.g. buffering three non-overlapping polygons, creating the intersection, calculating the center of the created intersection) of at least three steps, where the first and last are executed via a WPS and the second within R; and (ii) a raster-based hydrological model based on locally available netCDF files. The workflows serve both for the formulation of the requirements and the evaluation of the concept for a WPS client in R.

Deutsch:

Die große Zahl gewaltsamer Konflikte weltweit und das Ausmaß, zu dem Menschenrechte hierbei verletzt werden, machen eine genaue Überwachung und Dokumentation von Konflikten unabdingbar. Da eine ausführliche bodengebundene Überwachung des Kriegsverlaufes und seiner Auswirkungen jedoch -insbesondere in abgelegenen Regionen- häufig kaum möglich ist, werden Fernerkundungsmethoden und GI-Technologien immer häufiger dazu eingesetzt, Kampfhandlungen in Kriegsgebieten zu dokumentieren. Satellitenbilder können zum Beispiel visuellen Zugang zu schwer erreichbaren Regionen ermöglichen und lokale Berichte über Gewalt und Zerstörung bestätigen. Die meisten praktischen Anwendungen verlassen sich dabei bisher vor allem auf die manuelle Bildanalyse und Identifikation von verdächtigen Objekten (z.B. zerstörte Gebäude). Der Zeit- und Kostenaufwand solcher Analysen ist jedoch erheblich. Eine Möglichkeit, mit dem immensen Aufwand umzugehen, ist die Verteilung der Arbeit auf verschiedene Analysten in sogenannten crowd-sourcing Netzwerken (mit Hilfe von micro-tasking Anwendungen, siehe z. B. http://www.tomnod.com/). Hierbei werden die Fernerkundungsdaten in kleinere Ausschnitte eingeteilt und individuell von Freiwilligen auf z.B. zerstörte Gebäude untersucht. Eine andere Strategie ist die Verwendung (semi-) automatischer Bildanalyse- und Klassifikationsmethoden zur Identifikation von Zerstörungen, um den manuellen Aufwand zu verringern. Momentan konzentrieren sich die verschiedenen Ansätze entweder auf die web-mapping/crowd-sourcing Ansätze oder die Methoden zur automatischen Bildanalyse.

Ziel der Bachelorarbeit ist es, ein prototypisches web-mapping/crowd-sourcing Werkzeug zu entwickeln, dass beide genannten Strategien verbindet. Hierbei sollen bereits vorhandene Ergebnisse aus automatischen Bildanalysen integriert werden, indem sie als Basis für die Erstellung und Priorisierung der Bildausschnitte für die manuelle Analyse dienen. Bildausschnitte mit hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit/Dichte von Zerstörungen (gemäß der Ergebnisse der automatischen Methoden) sollen automatisch höhere Priorität im folgenden manuellen Analyseprozess bekommen. Die zu verarbeitenden Eingabedaten können dabei in unterschiedlichem Detaillierungsgrad vorliegen, z.B. Polygone mit unterschiedlichen Wahrscheinlichkeiten/Dichten von Zerstörung oder einzelne Punkte, die die Position von zerstörten Gebäuden anzeigen. Das zu entwickelnde Werkzeug sollte eine Methode enthalten, um mit Hilfe dieser Daten sinnvoll kleinere Ausschnitte aus den vorliegenden Fernerkundungsbildern zu erstellen und diese zu priorisieren. Zusätzlich sollten Werkzeuge bereitstehen, um Nutzer/innen eine sinnvolle Visualisierung bi-temporaler Daten (vor und nach angeblicher Attacken)  und das Markieren von Zerstörungen zu ermöglichen. Optional können natürlich weitere Methoden oder Schnittstellen für die Kombination automatischer und manueller Analyse erdacht und entwickelt werden.

English:

The high number of violent conflicts worldwide and the extent to which human rights are abused during acts of war stress the need for close monitoring and documentation of conflict areas to strengthen public international law. As a comprehensive ground‐level documentation of combat impacts is often hardly possible in conflict areas, satellite imagery and geospatial technology are increasingly being used to document and communicate human rights issues. Satellite images can for example provide visual access to remote or insecure areas as well as visual evidence to corroborate on-the-ground reports on human rights violations. Most of the practical applications rely on the manual image interpretation and identification of objects of interest. However, the time consumption of such analyses is substantial. One strategy to cope with the immense workload is to make use of a decentralized approach and distribute the work among several analysts e.g. within crowd-sourcing networks (by use of micro tasking tools, see e.g. http://www.tomnod.com/). Here the images are divided into subsets and individually investigated by volunteers. Another strategy is to use computer assisted methods for (semi-) automatic information extraction to reduce the analysis workload. Current approaches focus on either web-mapping for collaborative monitoring of violence or on image analysis and classification methods for automatically detecting structural damage in conflict areas.

The aim of this thesis is to develop a prototypical web-mapping and micro-tasking tool for collaborative conflict monitoring which combines both abovementioned fields. It should integrate existing results from automatic classification methods by using them as a basis for the automatic creation and prioritization of areas of interest. Areas with a high probability/density of destruction get a higher priority for the subsequent manual analysis by volunteers. The input data can be in different levels of detail, e.g. polygons of areas with different probabilities of destruction or even point data indicating the location of destructed buildings. The web application should include a method to create and prioritize image subsets based on this input data and contain tools for a meaningful visualization of bi-temporal image data (pre- and post-conflict image) as well as for manually tagging destructed buildings. Optionally, further methods and interfaces combining automatic and manual image analysis can be developed.

Die Veröffentlichung reproduzierbarer Forschung ist ein wichtiges Thema in der Wissenschaft. Darunter verstehen wir, dass die Forschungsergebnisse in einer wissenschaftlichen Publikation wiederholbar sind. In diesem Kontext fokussieren wir uns auf computergestützte Analysen (z.B. R) in den Geowissenschaften. Darauf aufbauend wollen wir auf verschiedenen Wegen "mehr Wissen" aus Publikationen rausholen, welches in traditionellen PDF Publikationen verborgen bleibt.

In diesem Bereich bieten sich viele verschiedene Themen an:

• Wie kann man aus statischen Abbildungen in wissenschaftlichen Publikationen dynamische, interaktive Abbildungen generieren?
• Wie lassen sich originale Abbildungen mit reproduzierten oder möglicherweise veränderten Abbildungen vergleichen (Slider, Keyhole, Überlagerung). Hier bietet sich eine Mischung aus Implementierung und Evaluation (z.B. Nutzerstudie) an.
• Basierend auf einer Abbildung in einer wissenschafltichen Publikation: Wie kann man weitere Abbildung erstellen, die an die Vorkenntnisse der Leser angepasst sind? Interessierte Leser, Journalisten, Wissenschaftler oder auch Politiker haben alle unterschiedliche Vorkenntnisse. Entsprechend sind Abbildungen in wissenschaftlichen Publikationen unterschiedlich gut/schlecht verständlich und trotzdem sollte jede,r in der Lage sein, von wiss. Ergebnissen zu lernen. Eine Möglichkeit besteht darin, unterschiedliche Abbildungen zu zeigen, die an die Vorkenntnisse der Leser angepasst sind.
• Falls ihr an Studien interessiert seid, könnt ihr euch bei uns austoben. Unsere Plattform bietet viele Möglichkeiten mit je nach Bedarf mehr oder weniger Implementierungsarbeit. Möglich sind sowohl quantitative als auch qualitative Studien. Zielgruppen sind in der Regel Forscher und Studenten.

Die Herangehensweise ist zunächst offen. Abhängig vom genauen Thema kann man den Fokus auf technische oder nutzerorientierte Aspekte legen. Die Implementierung kann in der Regel auf unsere bereits bestehende Infrastruktur aufbauen. Dadurch trägt jede Arbeit produktiv zu unserem Projekt bei und wird daher in enger Zusammenarbeit mit den o2r-Mitarbeitern durchgeführt. Die Arbeiten können auf Englisch oder Deutsch verfasst werden.

Die openSenseMap ist eine Plattform für Umweltsensordaten von Messstationen jeglicher Art. Zur Zeit werden nur Rohdaten von senseBoxen gespeichert und die Daten können sich nur pro senseBox angezeigt werden lassen. Zudem gibt es die Möglichkeit sich die gesammelten Daten für einen Zeitpunkt interpoliert darstellen zu lassen.

Ziel der Arbeit ist es, für die openSenseMap ein Portal zu entwicklen, in dem der Benutzer die Möglichkeit hat mehrere senseBoxen und Sensoren mit statistischen Methoden zu vergleichen und externe Datenquellen, wie zB. vom DWD, einzubinden.

In der Arbeit soll untersucht werden, inwieweit Qualitätssicherung von crowd-sourced Sensordaten in einem Sensornetzwerk automatisierbar ist. Dies ist ein neues und hoch relevantes Forschungsfeld: große Datenmengen erlauben die Anwendung statistischer oder machine learning-Verfahren. Traditionelle Verfahren sind häufig nicht nutzbar, da die Daten in Echtzeit vorliegen müssen. Zudem stellen crowd-sourced Daten eine spezielle Herausforderungen dar, da nicht davon ausgegangen werden kann, dass alle Daten mit korrekten bzw. konsistenten Messverfahren erhoben wurden. Schließlich haben low-cost-Sensoren selbst Messfehler, die von professionellen Sensoren stark abweichen. oder Messstationen sind von Citizen Scientists schlecht montiert. Das Ziel ist, die Einflussfaktoren auf die Datenqualität und die Messgenauigkeit der Sensoren zu erforschen, Verfahren zur automatisierten Identifikation fehlerhafter Daten und möglicher Fehlerquellen zu entwickeln sowie automatisiert Entscheidungen über Möglichkeit zur Korrektur der Daten (bspw. über Nachkalibrierung der Sensoren) oder Ausschluss bestimmter Daten zu treffen.

Usability ist ein wichtiger Aspekt für die Qualität moderner Software. In den letzten Jahren sind die Erwartungen der Anwender hinsichtlich einer guten Usability stark gestiegen. In den letzten 2 Dekaden haben daher zahlreiche wissenschaftliche Arbeiten untersucht, wie die Usability von Desktop- und Mobile-Anwendungen optimiert werden kann, siehe z.B. [1]. Trotz der großen Popularität dieses Themas wurde die Usability von Geoinformationssystemen (GIS) allerdings anscheinend weniger intensiv betrachtet. Einige Beispiele finden sich in [2–7]. Als führender Anbieter für integrierte Geo IT-Lösungen im internationalen Umfeld, optimiert con terra die Usability von Produkten und Lösungen kontinuierlich. In Zusammenarbeit mit Hochschulen und Universitäten konnten in diesem Kontext bereits spannende Abschlussarbeiten angeboten werden, siehe z.B. [8, 9].

Voice User Interfaces (VUI) haben durch die Fortschritte auf dem Gebiet der Künstlichen Intelligenz (KI) bzw. des Machine Learning (ML) in den letzten Jahren stark an Bedeutung gewonnen. So sind beispielsweise Siri und Alexa zu alltäglichen Begleitern geworden, um per Sprache bequem Musik abzuspielen oder die Beleuchtung zu steuern. Doch auch für GIS haben VUI eine große Relevanz, etwa für die Ausführung verketteter Abfragen. Diese sind mittels eines konventionellen Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) meist eher schwierig durchzuführen, lassen sich mit Hilfe eines VUIs aber einfach umgangssprachlich formulieren, z.B. in Form dieser gesprochenen oder geschriebenen Frage: „Welche beliebten italienischen Restaurants in meiner Nähe haben bis 23 Uhr geöffnet?“ Einen weiteren großen Vorteil entfalten VUI bei der Erfassung von ortsbezogenen Daten im Feld, während der die Hände für andere Tätigkeiten gebraucht werden, z.B. der Bedienung von Messgeräten.

Doch VUIs stellen hinsichtlich der Usability auch einige Herausforderungen dar. So soll diese Abschlussarbeit analysieren, wie akustische Rückmeldungen (Signifier) gestaltet und genutzt werden können, damit Benutzer möglichst präzise und zufriedenstellend den aktuellen Systemzustand eines per VUI gesteuerten GIS erfassen können. Dabei soll nicht nur der Erfolg oder Misserfolg einer ausgeführten Aktion rückgemeldet werden, sondern idealerweise auch unterschiedliche (Fehler-)Ursachen kommuniziert werden. Im Fehlerfall können Benutzer dadurch effizienter reagieren.

Im Rahmen dieser Abschlussarbeit soll daher zunächst der aktuelle Stand der Technik bzw. Literatur gesichtet und dargestellt werden. Anschließend sollen möglicher Weise vorhandene allgemeine Konzepte für VUI auf GIS übertragen und evaluiert werden. Dieses Konzept soll abschließend prototypisch umgesetzt und evaluiert werden, z.B. durch eine Benutzerstudie [1], SUS- [10] oder UEQ-Fragebögen [11].

Kontakt

Dr. Morin Ostkamp

con terra GmbH Martin-Luther-King-Weg 20 48155 Münster

+49 251 59689 325

m.ostkamp@conterra.de

Martin Wilden

con terra GmbH Martin-Luther-King-Weg 20 48155 Münster

+49 251 59689 336

m.wilden@conterra.de

Literatur

[1] J. Nielsen. Usability Engineering. Kaufmann, 1993

[2] C. Davies and D. Medyckyj-Scott. Gis usability: recommendations based on the user’s

view. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 8(2), 1994

[3] D. Schobesberger. Integrating User and Usability Research in Web-Mapping

Application Design. Modern Trends in Cartography. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation

and Cartography, J. Brus, A. Vondrakova and V. Vozenilek, Eds. Springer, 2015

[4] J. Komarkova, O. Visek and M. Novak. Heuristic evaluation of usability of GeoWeb

sites. Web and wireless geographical information systems. Springer, 2007

[5] A.-M. Nivala, S. Brewster and L. T. Sarjakoski. Usability Evaluation of Web Mapping

Sites. The Cartographic Journal, vol. 45, no. 2, 2008

[6] E. Park and J. Ohm. Factors influencing users’ employment of mobile map services.

Telematics and Informatics, vol. 31, no. 2, 2014

[7] A. Hussain, E. Mkpojiogu and M. Yusof. Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use,

and perceived enjoyment as drivers for the user acceptance of interactive mobile maps.

Proc. AIP ‘16, AIP Publishing, 2016

[8] Matthias Stein. Verbesserung der Usability bei der Steuerung von Karteninhalten auf

mobile Endgeräten. Bochum University of Applied Sciences, 2017

[9] Yevgeniya Litvinova. Feature Info – Improving the visualization and usability of GIS

background information in the context of a mobile tourist application. University of

Münster, 2017. https://run.unl.pt/bitstream/10362/33716/1/TGEO0164.pdf

[10] J. Brooke. SUS: A ‘quick and dirty’ usability scale. Usability Evaluation in Industry,

Taylor & Francis, 1996

[11] B. Laugewitz, T. Held and M. Schrepp. Construction and Evaluation of a User

Experience Questionnaire. USAB 2008, LNCS 5298, Springer, 2008

Learning Analytics is a method to collect, measure, analyze and visualize data about learners and their context. It enables the understaning of the learning process and allows an adaption of learning pathes based on the collected data. It also gives feedback to the learner and teacher about the learning process.

Im Rahmen dieser Bachelorarbeit sollen neue Sensorkomponenten für Umweltphänomene (z.B. Wind, Wasser, Radioaktivität o.ä.) für die senseBox identifiziert und in das senseBox Ökosystem aus Open Source Hardware, openSenseMap Geodateninfrastruktur, Blockly-Programmierumgebung integriert und evaluiert werden. 

When working and collaborating in a face-to-face scenario, the parties involved in the communication process are aware of each other's verbal and gestural communication cues in the shared physical space. However, in a remote collaboration scenario, communication becomes more challenging as the involved parties have to resort solely to verbal descriptions and utterances.

As hand gestures not only play a role in communication but also in creative design thinking (Visser & Maher, 2011), the need for better remote collaboration grows in professions that highly rely on design and creative activities. An example of this is Architectural Design. Architects often use gestures to complement information that is poorly represented or not represented in the media. For example, in a top-down architectural plan, they would use hand gestures to represent verticality.

This project aims to develop a system for enabling hand gestures in a remote collaboration scenario, with a special focus on architectural design and using architectural paper plans.

A hardware and software working prototype for this purpose has already been developed and implemented. This prototype consists of two twin tabletop systems with a depth camera and a projector attached to them. The system uses the depth camera (Intel RealSense) together with Computer Vision algorithms to recognise and capture hand gestures, transmits those gestures to the other twin system, and then projects those hand gestures on the other end table, augmenting the physical space. However, the scope of the current system is quite limited, as it only detects, logs, transmit and displays a number of hand gestures to the other end, and vice versa.

As a BSc thesis, the student should design and implement new functionality for the already working prototype. Promising functionality includes, for example, designing and implementing new ways to visualise verticality in the system, AR tools for allowing the users to modify the physical media (the paper plan), improving hand recognition with more advanced machine learning techniques (e.g. identifying hands from different users), or adapting the system to other fields (education, medicine, etc). 

As a MSc thesis, apart from the mentioned before, the student should also have to evaluate the implemented functionality in a user study. 

The student should have an interest in working with an existing codebase. Prior experience working with Javascript or Python is necessary. Additionally, knowledge or interest in Augmented Reality, Computer Vision and/or Machine Learning, with particular focus on hand detection and object recognition would be beneficial.

Relevant literature

Kim, M. & Maher, M. L. (2008). The impact of tangible user interfaces on spatial cognition during collaborative design. Design Studies, Vol. 29., pp. 222-253

Harmon, B. A., Petrasova, A., Petras, V., Mitasova, H., Meentemeyer R. (2018). Tangible topographic modeling for landscape architects, International Journal of Architectural Computing, Vol. 16(1) 4 – 21.

Visser, W. & Maher, M.L. (2011). Guest Editorial: The role of gesture in designing, Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing, 25(3):221-235.

Huang, W., & Alem, L. (2011). Supporting hand gestures in mobile remote collaboration: a usability evaluation. In Proceedings of HCI 2011 The 25th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction 25 (pp. 211-216).

Leithinger, D., Follmer, S., Olwal, A., & Ishii, H. (2014). Physical telepresence: shape capture and display for embodied, computer-mediated remote collaboration. In Proceedings of the 27th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (pp. 461-470).

Thema: Im Rahmen der gemeinsamen IFGIcopter und ILÖK UAV Initiative werden  kontinuierlich vegetationsspezifische Fernerkundungsdaten unterschiedlichster UAV-Sensoren (Drohnen) aufgenommen und ausgewertet. Besondere Schwerpunkte sind die Erfassung und Analyse von Vegetationsmustern, Vitalitätsparametern und inversiver Arten mittels multispektraler UAS Daten. In diesem Kontext spielen die Datenverarbeitung und Visualisierung (auch 3D) mittels verschiedenster geoinformatischer Werkzeuge (GIS, kommerzielle Software, Web-Tools und Eigenprogrammierungen etc.) eine große Rolle. Wer Interesse an einer interdisziplinären Fragestellung in diesem Bereich hat, wende sich an die beiden Ansprechpartner [2017].

Ansprechpartner: Torsten Prinz / Jan Lehmann

Maps are the fundamental source of providing configurational knowledge, while sketch maps reduce the complexity of map information and maintain a cognitively sufficient resource of spatial knowledge for wayfinding. In this study, sketch maps are cooperated with landmarks to achieve the goal of facilitating wayfinding and acquisition of spatial knowledge.

Tasks in this study include, but not limited:

1. Drawing from literature and previous research, an ideal level of details/complexity of sketch maps shall be derived;

2. Choosing landmarks at both local and global scales that could be integrated in the derived sketch maps;

3. Evaluating the effectiveness of integrated sketch maps.

This master thesis topic is intended to be combined with an external semester at the University of Albany (Prof. Rui Li).

Currently, the outcomes of research in Geoinformatics are usually reported in papers that are published in journals or conferences. These papers are inherently static, i.e. they only afford reading.  In particular, it is not possible to question the assumptions underlying the results (e.g. the thresholds or constraints used in a simulation study).  However, the research often is the result of applying well-defined procedures (or programs) to a particular dataset. In principle, it would be easy to change the value of threshold variables or constants in such a program to see what the result of this change would be.  If this was realised, new opportunities for interaction with research 'papers' would open up.

This thesis will investigate these new opportunities.  The topic could be approached from different directions, e.g. identifying and prototyping functionality that reasearchers would want, developing a model and system to enable novel interactions, or focussing on a specific paper to explore what would be possible.

Kleinstcomputer wie der Raspberry Pi haben im Bereich der Bastler und Bildung eine enorme Verbreitung gefunden. Dank der konstengünstigen Produktion von Platinen hat sich ein Ökosystem verschiedener Anbieter (zum Beispiel Odroid) auf Basis unterschiedlicher ARM-basierten Prozessoren mit mehr oder weniger Leistung oder Steckanschlüssen entwickelt (zum Beispiel eMMC Massenspeicheranschluss).

Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit soll der Student auf Basis eines solchen Systems einen Prototypen entwickeln, der in der Lage ist, eine reproduzierbare wissenschaftliche Analyse durchzuführen und das Ergbnis mit der Ursprünglichen Analyse zu vergleichen. Eine solche reproduzierbare Publikation ist mitsamt Daten und Analyseskripten in R in Form eines Docker Containers vorhanden. Da Docker aber die ARM-Architektur offiziell nicht unterstützt müssen die verschiedenen Community-Projekte gesichtet werden um eine Basis für das reproduzieren einer wissenschaftlichen Analyse zu schaffen. Auch die Docker Images für R müssen für ARM-Architekturen erstellt werden.

Wie kann so ein abgeschlossener Kasten für geowissenschaftliche Analysen, der in 30 Jahren nur an einen Bildschirm und Stromanschluss angeschlossen werden kann, funktionieren?

Die Arbeit kann auf Deutsch oder Englisch verfasst werden.

OriGami is a GeoGame fostering spatial literacy: The player has to solve several wayfinding tasks to various locations and answer questions at these locations. At the current state, it is a single-player game.

As part of this thesis, you would have to extend the concept of OriGami for a multi-player version, where players can compete or work together to solve tasks. After the conceptual development, you should implement a user management + implement the collaborative games and evaluate your game.

More information on OriGami can be found on our project website http://enable-project.eu/origami/.

Requirements:

You should have some experience in android programming and interest in location-based games.

Geosimulation models can help to better understand animal behavior, such as their movement patterns. Although some geosimulation models of animal (e.g. ant, deer, bird) movement have been developed, they have remained rather conceptual: applications of these models to real-world case studies are rare. Such applications were mainly hindered by data availability.

In a recent presentation in the GI forum, Benjamin Risse has shown his state-of-the-art methods derive animal tracks from camera images. One of his main current problems are ‘gaps’ in the tracks, which exist because the animal disappears from the camera image through obstruction by another object (tree, leaf, man-made structure, etc.).

This thesis aims to use (part of) Risse’s data for constructing an agent-based model of animal movement and (the other part) to compare how well this model can reproduce the animal tracks. Which particular animal is studied can be decided by the student in consultation with the supervisors. Depending on the attained model accuracies in this thesis, the developed model might be used to fill in the gaps in the animal track data at a later stage. The challenges in this thesis include:

• To translate the animal track data, built up form a moving camera, to the (static) spatial scale of the agent-based model;
• To derive the required agent-based-model inputs, especially the landscape, from the camera data;
• The model development itself; and
• To compare the stochastic output of the agent-based model with the deterministic track data.

This thesis will be supervised by Judith Verstegen and Benjamin Risse (Computer Science Department, Münster). This topic is only for students who followed Geosimulation Modelling or a similar course.

Computational research introduces challenges when it comes to reproducibility, i.e. re-doing an analysis with the same data and code. A current research project at ifgi developed a new approach called Executable Research Compendia (ERC, see https://doi.org/10.1045/january2017-nuest) to solve some of these challenges. ERC contain everything needed to run an analysis: data, code, and runtime environment. So they can be executed “offline” in a sandbox environment. An open challenge is the one of big datasets and reducing data duplication. While the idea of putting “everything” into the ERC is useful in many cases, once the dataset becomes very large it is not feasible to replicate it completely for the sake of reproducibility/transparency and to some extent for archival.

This thesis will create a concept for allowing ERC to communicate with specific data repositories (e.g. PANGAEA, GFZ Data Services) extending on previous work (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1478542). The new approach should let ERCs “break out” of their sandbox environments in a controlled and transparent fashion, while at the same time more explicitly configuring the allowed actions by a container (e.g. using AppArmor).

Since trust is highly important in research applications, the communication with remote services must be exposed to users in a useful and understandable fashion. Users who evaluate other scientists ERC must know which third party repositories are used and how. The concept must be (i) implemented in a prototype using Docker containerization technology and discussed from viewpoints of security, scalability, and transparency, and (ii) demonstrated with ERC based on different geoscience data repositories, e.g. Sentinel Hub, and processing infrastructure, e.g. openEO or WPS, including an approach for authentication. Furthermore it could be evaluated to define the sandbox more explicitly, and if the communication between ERC and remote service can be captured and then cached for an additional backup, so that future execution may re-use that backup.

Prior experience with Docker is useful but not a strict requirement.

Contact: Daniel Nüst
 

Creative industries are acknowledged to offer opportunities for socio-economic development of neighbourhoods (Booyens, 2012). Research into creative industries and creative city strategies has often focused on Global North contexts, and how policy making can spur the promotion of such industries and strategies. Less attention has been paid to creative industries development in Global South contexts (although see Cunningham, 2009; Booyens, 2012) and how these industries can best be used to support future local economic growth.

As a Global-South country, Indonesia offers the opportunity to study creative industries because several cities have been embracing creative industries and creative city discourses (Fahmi, McCann and Koster, 2017). Indonesian cities also host specific types of neighbourhoods – kampongs – where often craft-based and creative-based industries are found (Prasetyo and Iverson, 2013).

Current research is focused on identifying links between the different actors involved in the development and implementation of creative industries strategies. However, it is of yet unclear how the behaviour of these actors is influenced by the different current and potential strategies of the local government to promote commodification. The goal of this project is to develop and apply an Agent-Based Model (ABM) to understand commodification in creative industries, in Indonesian kampongs, in response to different local government strategies.

This project is a collaboration with Mafalda Mudureira, Ana Buscamente, and Karin Pfeffer from UT Twente, The Netherlands. These researchers have data available that can be used to set up the ABM.

Usability ist ein wichtiger Aspekt für die Qualität moderner Software. In den letzten Jahren sind die Erwartungen der Anwender hinsichtlich einer guten Usability stark gestiegen. In den letzten 2 Dekaden haben daher zahlreiche wissenschaftliche Arbeiten untersucht, wie die Usability von Desktop- und Mobile-Anwendungen optimiert werden kann, siehe z.B. [1]. Trotz der großen Popularität dieses Themas wurde die Usability von Geoinformationssystemen (GIS) allerdings anscheinend weniger intensiv betrachtet. Einige Beispiele finden sich in [2–7]. Als führender Anbieter für integrierte Geo IT-Lösungen im internationalen Umfeld, optimiert con terra die Usability von Produkten und Lösungen kontinuierlich. In Zusammenarbeit mit Hochschulen und Universitäten konnten in diesem Kontext bereits spannende Abschlussarbeiten angeboten werden, siehe z.B. [8, 9].

Voice User Interfaces (VUI) haben durch die Fortschritte auf dem Gebiet der Künstlichen Intelligenz (KI) bzw. des Machine Learning (ML) in den letzten Jahren stark an Bedeutung gewonnen. So sind beispielsweise Siri und Alexa zu alltäglichen Begleitern geworden, um per Sprache bequem Musik abzuspielen oder die Beleuchtung zu steuern. Doch auch für GIS haben VUI eine große Relevanz, etwa für die Ausführung verketteter Abfragen. Diese sind mittels eines konventionellen Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) meist eher schwierig durchzuführen, lassen sich mit Hilfe eines VUIs aber einfach umgangssprachlich formulieren, z.B. in Form dieser gesprochenen oder geschriebenen Frage: „Welche beliebten italienischen Restaurants in meiner Nähe haben bis 23 Uhr geöffnet?“ Einen weiteren großen Vorteil entfalten VUI bei der Erfassung von ortsbezogenen Daten im Feld, während der die Hände für andere Tätigkeiten gebraucht werden, z.B. der Bedienung von Messgeräten.

Doch VUIs stellen hinsichtlich der Usability auch einige Herausforderungen dar. So soll diese Abschlussarbeit analysieren, wie akustische Rückmeldungen (Signifier) gestaltet und genutzt werden können, damit Benutzer möglichst präzise und zufriedenstellend den aktuellen Systemzustand eines per VUI gesteuerten GIS erfassen können. Dabei soll nicht nur der Erfolg oder Misserfolg einer ausgeführten Aktion rückgemeldet werden, sondern idealerweise auch unterschiedliche (Fehler-)Ursachen kommuniziert werden. Im Fehlerfall können Benutzer dadurch effizienter reagieren.

Im Rahmen dieser Abschlussarbeit soll daher zunächst der aktuelle Stand der Technik bzw. Literatur gesichtet und dargestellt werden. Anschließend sollen möglicher Weise vorhandene allgemeine Konzepte für VUI auf GIS übertragen und evaluiert werden. Dieses Konzept soll abschließend prototypisch umgesetzt und evaluiert werden, z.B. durch eine Benutzerstudie [1], SUS- [10] oder UEQ-Fragebögen [11].

Kontakt

Dr. Morin Ostkamp

con terra GmbH Martin-Luther-King-Weg 20 48155 Münster

+49 251 59689 325

m.ostkamp@conterra.de

Martin Wilden

con terra GmbH Martin-Luther-King-Weg 20 48155 Münster

+49 251 59689 336

m.wilden@conterra.de

Literatur

[1] J. Nielsen. Usability Engineering. Kaufmann, 1993

[2] C. Davies and D. Medyckyj-Scott. Gis usability: recommendations based on the user’s

view. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 8(2), 1994

[3] D. Schobesberger. Integrating User and Usability Research in Web-Mapping

Application Design. Modern Trends in Cartography. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation

and Cartography, J. Brus, A. Vondrakova and V. Vozenilek, Eds. Springer, 2015

[4] J. Komarkova, O. Visek and M. Novak. Heuristic evaluation of usability of GeoWeb

sites. Web and wireless geographical information systems. Springer, 2007

[5] A.-M. Nivala, S. Brewster and L. T. Sarjakoski. Usability Evaluation of Web Mapping

Sites. The Cartographic Journal, vol. 45, no. 2, 2008

[6] E. Park and J. Ohm. Factors influencing users’ employment of mobile map services.

Telematics and Informatics, vol. 31, no. 2, 2014

[7] A. Hussain, E. Mkpojiogu and M. Yusof. Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use,

and perceived enjoyment as drivers for the user acceptance of interactive mobile maps.

Proc. AIP ‘16, AIP Publishing, 2016

[8] Matthias Stein. Verbesserung der Usability bei der Steuerung von Karteninhalten auf

mobile Endgeräten. Bochum University of Applied Sciences, 2017

[9] Yevgeniya Litvinova. Feature Info – Improving the visualization and usability of GIS

background information in the context of a mobile tourist application. University of

Münster, 2017. https://run.unl.pt/bitstream/10362/33716/1/TGEO0164.pdf

[10] J. Brooke. SUS: A ‘quick and dirty’ usability scale. Usability Evaluation in Industry,

Taylor & Francis, 1996

[11] B. Laugewitz, T. Held and M. Schrepp. Construction and Evaluation of a User

Experience Questionnaire. USAB 2008, LNCS 5298, Springer, 2008

Researchers have been studying how people learn and generate a route between two destinations and what criteria they use to complete this task (Golledge 1997). Pedestrians, drivers, cyclists and public transport users’ movements have indeed assumed a growing relevance when tackling city dynamics. Knowing how people formulate a route within the street network may improve the realism in pedestrian movement simulations and, thereby, support urban design decisions, traffic planning, mobility demand analysis and land-use/service allocations.

In this context, landmarks (or points of reference) have been identified as environmental features that affect spatial behaviour (Richter & Winter 2014). Yet, little work has been done to understand how they shape the actual decisions in pedestrian movement. In order to realistically reproduce and understand pedestrian movement in cities, a computational approach that combines known routing algorithms with landmark salience measures has been developed in a project at the Geosimulation lab of IFGI.

The aim of the research is to study the ability of this computational approach to predict how people identify and readjust their routes. The first phase consists of collecting qualitative data regarding pedestrian movements (e.g., asking people to draw their paths in the city). The second phase is comparing the collected data with the routes predicted computationally. In the last phase, the computational approach may be recalibrated according to the discrepancies emerged, manipulating the weights used to compute the landmark salience, so as to obtain more satisfying computational estimates.

This thesis is supervised by Gabriele Filomena (gabriele.filomena@uni-muenster.de) and Judith Verstegen (j.a.verstegen@uni-muenster.de).

References

Golledge, R.G., 1997. Defining The Criteria Used In Path Selection. In D. F. Ettema & H. Timmermans, eds. Activity-based approaches to travel analysis. New York, NY: Elsevier, pp. 151–169.

Richter, K.-F. & Winter, S., 2014. Landmarks: Giscience For Intelligent Services, Cham: Springer.

Learning Analytics ist eine Methode zur Erfassung, Messung, Analyse und Visualisierung von Daten über Lernende und ihren Kontext, die es ermöglicht den Lernfortschritt zu verstehen und Lernpfade zu optimieren, um dem Lernenden aber auch Lehrenden Feedback zum Lernprozess zu geben. Learning Analytics lässt sich besonders gut in digitale Lernplattformen einbinden. Blockly für die senseBox ermöglicht es Anfängern in die Mikrocontrollerprogrammierung einzusteigen.Trotzdem können Fehler im "Code" entstehen, wodurch das Programm nicht kompilierbar ist. 

Ziel der Arbeit ist die Entwicklung einer Learning Analytics Komponente, die dem Nutzer Feedback zum selbst programmierten Code gibt, Hinweise bei Fehlern und Lernfortschritte trackt.

Learning Analytics is a method to collect, measure, analyze and visualize data about learners and their context. It enables the understanding of the learning process and allows an adaption of learning paths based on the collected data. It also gives feedback to the learner and teacher about the learning process.

WebGIS NRW is a prototypical WebGIS for educational purposes (webgis.nrw) based on MapBox GL.

In this thesis you should investigate the possibilities of learning analytics for the work with webGIS, i.e. cartography, map design, data analysis. A prototypical implementation of learning analytics components for webgis.nrw is part of the work.

The Executable Research Compenium (ERC) developed by Opening Reproducible Research (https://o2r.info) provides an approach for solving the challenges of reproducibility and reusability of scholarly research in the geosciences. With the help of a UI and a reproducibility service, academic authors can easily create a snapshot of their research workflow at the time of submitting it for a peer review. However, the ERC is currently limited to workflows based on R and using R Markdown. In this work, the student will explore what changes need to be made to the ERC specification to support geospatial workflows in Python. How can users of common open source GIS (e.g. QGIS) be supported in packaging their scripted workflow in an ERC, ideally without any programming? How can suitable virtual environments (i.e. Dockerfiles) be derived from the workspace metadata (e.g. QGIS project file) and workflow (e.g. created with QGIS Process Modeller)?

The student should have an interest in working with an existing codebase and multiple programming languages. Some experience with Node.js, Python, and Docker is useful.

Social networks have been (mis)used to spread propaganda and fake news. Most social networks rely on a pre-existing infrastructure with a central gateway, making it relatively easy for people or bots to spread information. In contrast, in ad-hoc networks each node participates in the spreading of information by forwarding data to other nodes, e.g. with Bluetooth. As such, ad-hoc networks are built up in the node’s direct surroundings, i.e. in the spatial neighborhood instead of in the ‘social’ neighborhood. For example, in Hong Kong, the ad-hoc service Apple Air Drop was used to share flyers on upcoming protests. Air Drop enables pure decive-2-device sharing without intermediaries who could have blocked the communication. This may be "liberating" in repressive systems but may also be another "attack vector" in social media systems that build on ad-hoc anonymity.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the dynamics of communication in a hypothetical ad-hoc (social) network in the context of the spreading of propaganda and fake news. Depending on the interest of the student, a prototype ad-hoc network may be set up to gather real-world data or an agent-based model may be developed to simulate the spreading of information in different geographic contexts. This thesis will be supervised by Judith Verstegen and Christian Grimme (Department of Information Systems, Münster).

Ziel dieser Arbeit ist die technische Umsetzung eines Lernspiels für den Geographieunterricht, das am Institut für Didaktik der Geographie (IfDG) entwickelt wurde. In diesen sogenannten „Reflectories“ werden User in kurzen Audio-Beiträgen vor komplexe geographische Entscheidungen gestellt, die mithilfe von unterschiedlichen Zusatzmaterialien getroffen werden müssen. Je nach gewählter Entscheidungsoption nimmt die Handlung einen anderen Verlauf, sodass sich die User mit den entsprechenden Konsequenzen ihrer Entscheidungen konfrontiert sehen und aufgefordert sind, über ihr Handeln zu reflektieren.

Aufgabe der Arbeit ist die Umsetzung der erarbeiteten Inhalte (hauptsächlich Audio-Dateien, einige PDF und Bilddateien) in eine systemunabhängige (Web-)App. Dazu gehört u. a. die Erstellung und Evaluation einer für die Zielgruppe geeignete Benutzeroberfläche sowie eine robuste Implementation des Backends.

Die Arbeit ist in Zusammenarbeit mit dem IfDG (Gabriele Schrüfer, Nina Brendel) geplant.

New Zealand has a large problem with invasive species supressing the native vegetation. A very common invader is gorse (Ulex europaeus) that was introducedas a hedge plant and now covers large areas with negative consequences not only for the native vegetation but also for the productivity of farmland. Being a nitrogen fixing plant it is even discussed if gorse contributes to decreasing water quality due to leaching of nitrogen to the streams.
Despite the relevance, an accurate map of the current distribution of gorse in new Zealand is still missing.
This project aims at using Sentinel-2 data to map the distribution of gorse for entire New Zealand. Therefore, cloud-free composites should be created using data from September- Novemeber where gorse is in (yellow) flower and easiest to detect from satellite. Classification algorithms will then be applied to map the distribution.

Dynamic, personalised signage - public displays that show navigational instructions and wayfinding information - can be very useful to help people to successfully reach their destination in complex indoor environments. However, outfitting a large building with a dense infrastructure of public displays would be costly and resource-intensive. One way to overcome is the idea to use virtual displays that can only be seen using a person's mobile device. This thesis will investigate this idea, and test it using a prototypical implementation.

This idea behind this comes from Luescher and Weibel (2010) - "we might for example present a different answer to the question ‘shopping opportunities in the city centre?’ to elderly people than to young people (the former avoiding the night club district because they might perceive it unsafe)."

Despite the notion of place being widespread in natural language, it is still difficult to model it in a GIS (which is more concerned with location). The student can identify a suitable site, and attempt to study how the notion of place differs among participants of different age groups (young vs. old), residence (e.g living in the city vs. suburbs) etc. The analysis could offer insights into whether there are differences in the way a place is perceived based on these factors and has potential implications for contextualized location based services.

In the WayTo research project, we developed a prototype to visualize global landmarks which are outside the map section displayed on a mobile device by visualizing them at the edge of screen to indicate directions.

An amendment to this design is to incorporate distance into the design of icons. The thesis could explore different techniques (e.g. halo (circles at the edge), wedge (triangle at the edge), or distance-encoding arrows). These methods distinguish only two or three levels (or four maximum) of icons size (that means we only have 4 different sizes of each global landmarks to indicate very close, close, far, and very far) on screen. Although there is hardly any empirical data to support that, drawing from cartographic theories regarding visual variables in animated map making, humans are not able to distinguish changes on map representation at fine levels.

Possible bachelor and master thesis could address:

1.    Implementing distance and direction indicating landmarks (DDL) display on mobile phones

2.    Investigating the effects of DDL on mobile screens on spatial orientation and spatial knowledge

3.    Comparing the variations of DDL design (gradient to true distance vs. categorical distance)

4.    Comparing the effects of DDL with Halo and Wedge design

Reference: Li, R.; Korda, A.; Radtke, M.; Schwering, A. (2014): Visualising distant off-screen landmarks on mobile devices to support spatial orientation. https://www.uni-muenster.de/forschungaz/publication/99385?lang=en

Isovist analysis is used to predict how people behave in and 'feel about' the geometry of space. One of the best-documented examples of such relation is provided by Wiener et al. (2007). In this work, the authors controlled the shape of a Virtual Reality environment and measured how people experience individual spaces, depending on its underlying isovist properties.

Recently, 3d isovist analysis became increasingly popular in contexts where its traditional 2d counterpart suffers major limitations. However, it is not clear if the influence of isovists on human experience can be directly extrapolated from the 2d to the 3d analysis. In this thesis, the student will replicate the VR experiment of Wiener and colleagues, taking into account the vertical component of human experience and using a 3-dimensional isovist in the analysis of final results.

Wiener, J. M., Franz, G., Rossmanith, N., Reichelt, A., Mallot, H. A., & Bülthoff, H. H. (2007). Isovist analysis captures properties of space relevant for locomotion and experience. Perception, 36(7), 1066 – 1083. http://doi.org/10.1068/p5587

Krukar, J., Schultz, C., Bhatt, M., (forthcoming). Towards Embodied 3d Isovists: Incorporating cognitively-motivated semantics of `space’ and the architectural environment in 3D visibility analysis

TBA

A major task in environmental science is to obtain spatially comprehensive data from limited field samples (e.g. climate stations, soil profiles, vegetation records,...). This is often done using machine learning algorithms that learn the relationships between field data and remotely sensed predictor variables (e.g. from satellites). The developed model is then used to make spatial predictions for the entire area of interest (i.e. create a "map" of the variable of interest).
Such a map is only valuable when the error of the model is known. The error assessment however causes major difficulties for models with spatial dependencies and cause standard validation methods to fail. There is increasing consent in literature that spatial validation is necessary and several strategies have been proposed (e.g. Roberts 2018, Meyer 2018, Valavi 2018, Brenning 2012). However, little research is done on how different strategies compare, which however is important to know for model comparisons and for finding the "right" validation strategy for a dataset.
This project aims at comparing and (as far as possible) evaluating different validation strategies for machine learning based spatial mapping of environmental variables. Usually in most projects the "true" performance is hard to assess due to the fact that the reference data are limited. Therefore we want to adress the problem using reference data that are available in a spatially continuous way hence providing a continuous reference. Such data are rare but a possible research task would be available in the field of rainfall monitoring: The RADOLAN dataset contains high quality rainfall data from a radar network in 1km spatial resolution and serves as an excellent reference set. We then want to model rainfall for Germany using data from the the geostationary satellite sensor MSG SEVIRI and auxiliary predictor variables such as elevation (see Kühnlein 2014 for the idea of mdoelling rainfall based on MSG SEVIRI).
Using the RADOLAN data we simulate different sampling designs (hence we simulate raingauges in different constellations: random, clustered,...) and train machine learning models to predict rainfall from MSG SEVIRI in a spatial way. Different strategies for spatial model evaluation are then compared.

Requirements:

R programming is an advantage, interest in working with machine learning algorithms

References:

Brenning, A. (2012): Spatial cross-validation and bootstrap for the assessment of prediction rules in remote sensing: The R package sperrorest. IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

Kühnlein, M., T. Appelhans, B. Thies, and T. Nauss, 2014: Precipitation Estimates from MSG SEVIRI Daytime, Nighttime, and Twilight Data with Random Forests. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, 53 (11), 2457–2480.

Meyer, H., Reudenbach, C., Hengl, T., Katurji, M., Nauss, T. (2018): Improving performance of spatio-temporal machine learning models using forward feature selection and target-oriented validation. Environmental Modelling & Software 101: 1-9.

Roberts, D. R., V. Bahn, S. Ciuti, M. S. Boyce, J. Elith, G. Guillera-Arroita, S. Hauenstein, J. J. Lahoz-Monfort, B. Schröder, W. Thuiller, D. I. Warton, B. A. Wintle, F. Hartig, and C. F. Dormann, 2017: Cross-validation strategies for data with temporal, spatial, hierarchical, or phylogenetic structure. Ecography, doi:10.1111/ecog.02881.

Valavi R, Elith J, Lahoz‐Monfort JJ, Guillera‐Arroita G. blockCV: An r package for generating spatially or environmentally separated folds for k‐fold cross‐validation of species distribution models. Methods Ecol Evol. 2018;00:1–8. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13107
 

Climate change-driven shifts in streamflow timing have been documented for Western North America and are expected to continue with increased warming. These changes will likely have the greatest implications on already short and overcommitted water supplies in the region. This study investigated changes in Western North American streamflow timing over the 1948 – 2008 period, including the very recent warm decade not previously considered, through a) trends in streamflow timing measures b) two second order linear models applied simultaneously over the region to test for the acceleration of these changes, and c) changes in runoff regimes. Basins were categorized by the percentage of snowmelt derived runoff to enable the comparison of groups of streams with similar runoff characteristics and to quantify shifts in snowmelt-dominated regimes.

Results indicate that streamflow has continued to shift to earlier in the water year, most notably for those basins with the largest snowmelt runoff component. However, an acceleration of these streamflow timing changes for the recent warm decades is not clearly indicated. Most coastal rain-dominated and some interior basins have experienced later timing. The timing changes are connected to area-wide warmer temperatures, especially in March and January, and precipitation shifts that bear sub-regional signatures. Notably, a set of the most vulnerable basins has experienced runoff regime changes, such that basins that were snowmelt dominated at the beginning of the observational period shifted to mostly rain dominated in later years. These most vulnerable regions for regime shifts are in the California Sierra Nevada, eastern Washington, Idaho, and north-eastern New Mexico. Snowmelt regime changes may indicate that the time available for adaptation of water supply systems to climatic changes in vulnerable regions are shorter than previously recognized.

Sensors monitor our environment for a variety of purposes such as tracking natural forces, forecasting the weather or supporting military operations. The value of a sensor data application depends on the number and density of integrated sensing devices as well as on their fitness for the application's purpose. The latter is determined by several factors. A flow forecast application, for instance, might integrate high quality sensors that measure water levels and are located in a certain area on the globe.

Sensor selection requires meaningful and machine-readable descriptions of sensor attributes, such as observed properties, unit of measure, calibration, deployment time, accuracy, and observation area. Although the OGC standard SensorML is well adapted to encode sensor metadata, editing tools that support the creation process of such detailed sensor metadata documents are missing.

The BSc thesis should design and implement a sensor metadata editor that eases creation of SensorML 2.0 documents. These documents should

1. be semantically annotated with keywords from well-known ontologies, such as weather phenomenon expressions or unit of measure terms.
2. follow the StarFL profile for terrestrial sensing devices.

Contact:

Christian Malewski (c.malewski@uni-muenster.de)

Werner Kuhn (kuhn@uni-muenster.de)

Videobasierte Visualisierungsumgebungen zeigen großes Potenzial für die Geovisualisierung. Gestensteuerung eignet sich für die intuitive Interaktion mit solchen Umgebungen. Inhalt dieser Arbeit ist der Vergleich zweier existierender Gestensteuerungsansätze.

In contrast with wayfinding instructions given by machine routing services (e.g. Google Maps, MapQuest, etc.), humans give wayfinding instructions in a different format.  Human instructions, however, consist of landmarks at different levels and orientation information. Studies have shown that the use of local landmarks and global landmarks have different patterns across different scales and modes of transportation, when wayfinding instructions are given verbally. In this proposed study, the researcher will be investigating the exclusive roles of scale and mode of transportation on use of both local and global landmarks.

Map matching is the matching of GPS trajectories to existing road segments. Several algorithms have been proposed and evaluated for this. This thesis will create and document an open source implementation of one of the more successful of these algorithms.

On the bachelor level, a simple implementation in a new or existing R package is required. On the Master level, a comparison of different modelling approaches and implementation forms is additionally required.

Requirement: experience with R and R programming.

Resulting package:

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/fuzzyMM/index.html

Providing navigation support is not only guiding a wayfinder to reach one or multiple destinations. More importantly, it should support the wayfinder’s spatial orientation to facilitate the wayfinder’s awareness of the environment. Research has suggested approaches to enhance a person’s spatial orientation while using mobile navigation systems. Building on the previous work of visualizing global landmarks on mobile systems, this research further contribute to this development through the following two objectives:

1. Selecting and visualizing local landmarks that would combine with the use of visualized global landmarks on mobile screen;
2. Integrating the visualized global and local landmarks in instructions.

The outcome of this research is a prototype of mobile navigation service that uses global and local landmarks in both visual and verbal instructions.

Das Ziel ist es, Befehle zur Steuerung eines Immersive-Video- Environments (IVE) per Spracheingabe zu realiseren. So sollen z.B. Befehle wie "Nach links", "Nach rechts", "Gerade aus" oder "Ich öffne die Tür" in entsprechende Aktionen innerhalb der simulierten Umgebung umgesetzt werden. Dazu sollen APIs und Services wie zum Beispiel Wit.AI genutzt werden. Welche Befehle lassen sich damit realiseren, u.a. hinsichtlich ihrer Länge (z.B. "Ich folge der Straße rechts von mir" vs. "nach rechts") und ihrer Komplexität (z.B. "Ich gehe nach rechts. Dann öffne ich die Tür." vs. "Nachdem ich rechts abgebogen bin, öffne ich die Tür.")? Welche technischen Geräte (z.B. Mikrofon- Arrays) sind mit welchen Eigenschaften (z.B. Abstand zum Sprecher) nötig?

Es gibt verschiedene Möglichkeiten Menschen mit Karten zu Navigieren. Die meisten unterstützen entweder die bestmögliche Routenführung oder das Aneignen von räumlichen Umgebungsinformationen (Münzer, Zimmer, & Baus, 2012).

In der vorliegenden Bachelorarbeit wurde auf Basis der wissenschaftlichen Arbeit von Schmid, Richter, & Peters (2010) eine neuartige Möglichkeit der Navigation, die Route Aware Map, im Hinblick auf die Vermittlung von räumlichen Wissen untersucht. In dieser wird durch Berechnung des Weges und Anzeigen der Karte in der Vogelperspektive mit relevanten Umgebungsinformationen versucht, zum einen eine gute Routenführung zu ermöglichen und gleichzeitig die räumliche Wissensakquise zu fördern.

The semantic sensor web publishes sensor metadata and observations using linked data technologies, e.g. the Semantic Sensor Network Ontology (SSNO). The GEO label is a visual and interactive metadata summary to make complex standardized metadata (i.e. ISO 19xxx-based) more accessible to users by visualizing the most important aspects of metadata for discovering suitable datasets. Examples for these so called facets are producer information, quality information, and expert reviews.

This thesis will evaluate SSNO and related ontologies to create a mapping between data encoded in linked data documents and the facets of the GEO label. This mapping will be used to implement a partial prototype of the GEO label API that supports the generation of visual GEO labels based on references to sensor (meta-) data encoded in SSNO.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is widely used and is a major positioning technology for land vehicle navigation. However it is not 100% accurate, which is a problem for any kind of navigation system. There are several factors that contribute to positioning errors, e.g., satellite related errors, propagation related errors, receiver related errors, GPS signal masking or blockage and satellite geometric contribution to position error (Quddus, 2006). This is where map matching comes in.

Map matching is the process of matching GPS trajectories to a digital road network. This is done by map matching algorithms. In Quddus (2006) several of the existing map matching algorithms are discussed and three improved map matching algorithms are introduced. One of the more successful algorithms is the fuzzy logic map matching algorithm, whose implementation is the main part of the bachelor thesis.

The above mentioned map matching algorithm is implemented in R (R Core Team, 2013) and therefore it is open source. The testing of the algorithm is done using _eld data acquired from the enviroCar1 project.

The result of this bachelor thesis is a documentation and an R package providing functions which allow the user to match their GPS trajectories to a digital road network using the fuzzy logic map matching algorithm and also allow the customization of the parameters used in the membership functions in the fuzzi_cation process.

A few years ago, all computer practicals at the university were taught at university-owned desktop computers. Nowadays, many students prefer to work on their own laptops. The installation of all required software and packages, and the setting of environment variables can be cumbersome.

In this project, you will test a solution for this problem by developing web tutorials in which the programming exercises can implemented, run, and stored, without any installation on the part of the user. The idea is to implement Jupyter Notebooks (http://jupyter.org/index.html) with a server running JupyterHub. For an example on how Jupyter is used in education, see https://developer.rackspace.com/blog/deploying-jupyterhub-for-education/. You can use existing IFGI course material for programming in R and/or PCRaster Python as test data. If successful, your solution will be implemented in the curriculum.

Citizen science and crowdsourced data have been getting the attention of researchers and citizens alike in recent times. A successful citizen science platform that wants to engage its users in a long term participation needs to meet above average standards in usability and functionality for both power and novice users. In this thesis the citizen science platform OpenSenseMap, a generic platform for environmental sensor data, will be improved based on feedback that was gathered in its rst year of use and general principles of web design. A usability test will give indications on how well its users like to interact with it and what still needs to be done.

43 Millionen Personenkraftwagen nehmen am Straßenverkehr in Deutschland teil, wovon 95% auf fossile Brennstoffe angewiesen sind [BMU 2010][KBA 2013]. Das starke Verkehrsaufkommen, vor allem in Städten, hat negative Folgen für die Umwelt und die Gesundheit der dort lebenden Menschen. So hatte im Jahr 2004 allein in Deutschland der Straßenverkehr einen Anteil von 20% am Gesamtvolumen der direkten CO2-Emissionen [BMU 2008]. Im Vergleich zum Jahr 2000 ist der Kraftfahrzeugbestand in Deutschland um 13,2% angestiegen. Während die Verkehrsinfrastruktur im überörtlichen Bereich bei Kreisstraßen und Autobahnen nur geringe Zunahmen, bei Bundesstraßen sogar Verluste erzielt [DeSTATIS 2012a][DeSTATIS 2012b]. Die Verluste bei Bundesstraßen und Zugewinne bei Kreisstraßen sind meist auf regionale Änderungen der Verkehrsinfrastruktur zurückzuführen. So können Bundesstraßen beispielsweise zu Kreisstraßen umstrukturiert werden [DBT 2013]. Innerorts sind größtenteils nur durch die Erschließung neuer Wohn- und Gewerbegebiete Zuwächse der Verkehrsinfrastruktur zu beobachten [ADAC 2008]. Eine zusätzliche Belastung für die Verkehrswege ist die steigende Fahrleistung der Personenkraftfahrzeuge. Diese betrug im Jahr 2011 schätzungsweise 610 Milliarden Kilometer [DIW 2012]. Dies belastet vor allem innerörtliche Verkehrswege, welche Aufgrund der umliegenden Bebauung nicht weiter ausgebaut werden können. Zunehmenden Einfluss erhalten daher Maßnahmen zur Veränderung des Verkehrsverhaltens, beispielsweise durch Einsatz von Umweltzonen oder Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzungen, um den Verkehrsfluss zu optimieren.

Um Prognosen und Verkehrsplanungen durchführen zu können, bedarf es einer zuverlässigen Erhebung von Informationen zum Straßenverkehr in Deutschland. Hierzu gibt das Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Bau und Stadtentwicklung das sogenannte deutsche Mobilitätspanel in Auftrag. Es finden seit 1994 jährlich und in dreijähriger Begleitung, Befragungen von knapp 2000 Personen zu ihrem Verkehrsverhalten statt. Unter anderem werden Informationen über die Länge der Wegstrecken sowie Kosten und Kraftstoffverbrauch, erhoben [DIW 2012]. Anhand dieser Erhebung kann nicht nur die Fahrleistung in Kilometern geschätzt werden, sondern auch der durchschnittliche und gesamte Kraftstoffverbrauch und die Schadstoffemission der Fahrzeuge. Der Gesamtverbrauch an Kraftstoff wird ebenfalls aus dem an den Tankstellen abgesetzten Volumen Kraftstoffe, sowie auf Grundlage von Verbrauchsangaben der Fahrzeughersteller und Automobilzeitschriften geschätzt [DIW 2004].

Gerade der Energie- und Kraftstoffverbrauch ist wichtig für die Berechnung der CO2-Emissionen und bilden eine weitere Informationsgrundlage zur Alltagsmobilität für die Stadt- und Verkehrsplanung. Die langfristigen Ziele in der Umweltpolitik sind daher, eine Senkung der CO2- und Schadstoffemissionen und einen geringeren Ressourcenverbrauch im Personenkraftverkehr zu erreichen. In vielen städtischen Bereichen werden daher Monitoringsysteme zur Überwachung der Luftqualität oder der Verkehrsstärke eingesetzt, um regelmäßig wichtige Umweltinformationen erfassen, die als Grundlage umweltpolitischer Entscheidungen dienen. An diesem Punkt setzt das EnviroCar-Projekt an.

Geographische Informationssysteme (GIS) bieten neue Möglichkeiten auch webbasierte Anwendungen zu entwickeln,welche die klassischenAufgaben reiner Desktop-GIS-Software auf das Internet adaptieren.

Im Rahmen dieser Bachelorarbeit soll eine prototypische GIS-Architektur entwickelt werden, welche die Integration von geographischen sowie empirisch erhobenen, medizinischen Felddaten ermöglicht. Als Fallstudie dient das Forschungsprojekt am St. Michael’s Hospital Pramso in Ghana, welches die regionale Ausbreitung der Malaria untersucht. Das implementierte System soll dabei drei Hauptbestandteile bereitstellen, welche den Wissenschaftler vor Ort unterstützen: Visualisierung und Speicherung von Kontext relevanten Daten, grundlegende Analysemöglichkeiten mit der Ausgabe von Informationsprodukten sowie eine GIS gestützte Aufnahme neuer Krankheitsfälle.

Snowmelt derived water is of great importance for most streams across Western North America. A changing climate affects streamflow and changes its intraannual contribution. Shifts of the center of timing (CT) and the start of snowmelt pulse towards earlier in the year have already been detected for the 1948-2000 period. While the trends for CT have increased for the 1948-2008 period, the ones for the snowmelt pulse did not appear to have accelerated. In contrast the number of snowmelt pulses decreased within the same period and indicated that more winter precipitation came as rain rather than snow. Based on the ratio of years with and without snowmelt pulses this study has developed a measure of snowmelt domination and classified the streams into four categories. These categories were used to compare groups of streams with similar runoff characteristics and to quantify shifts in snowmelt domination regimes. Furthermore the data and measures were interactively visualized on a virtual globe using Nasa World Wind Java.

The emergence of new hardware in the Veld of human-computer interaction has led to many possible applications for gesture control. One possible application for such a gesture control is a virtual globe as it is widely used and an easy way to display spatial data among other data. Also virtual globes are easy accessible. This bachelor thesis aims to combine a virtual globe with gesture control for spatial and temporal aspects. For this, a set of gestures were implemented. These gestures were tested at a science fair where an user study Mwas carried out. Furthermore the general approach of implementing the gestures are described. The results and Vndings of the user study will be discussed in this thesis.

Große multi-touch Benutzerschnittstellen ermöglichen die simultane Interaktion mehrerer Benutzer. Hierfür muss bei vielen multi-touch Anwendungen eine Eingabe einem bestimmten Benutzer zugewiesen werden. In dieser Arbeit wird eine Methode vorgestellt, mit der eine Person mit Hilfe eines üblichen Mobiltelefons für eine Subregion der multi-touch Oberfläche authentifiziert werden kann. Dies erfolgt über Farbsignale, die die Kamera des mobilen Gerätes erfasst. Zuerst wird durch Anzeige von Binärbäumen in Form von zweifarbigen Rechtecken die exakte Position der Kamera bestimmt, dann wird genau an dieser Position ein nur für die Kamera sichtbares Signal, bestehend aus einer Sequenz von unterschiedlichen Farben, übertragen. Wenn dieses korrekt aufgenommen wurde, ist der Benutzer an dieser Stelle authentifiziert.

Current Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR) systems are very capable at modelling our everyday world, but their ability to deal with spatial data in a qualitative manner is limited. By integrating existing ontologies and applying techniques from Declarative Spatial Reasoning and Computer Vision to example cases from histopathology, a possible approach on adding semantics to image data is presented. The prototype has the goal of supporting the identification of inconsistencies between image data and the underlying knowledge base, as well as hypothesising and inferring improvements of the image classification. The ability to create artificial instances from the knowledge base alone and to represent their geometries dynamically is pursued as well.

The amount of citizen science initiatives and their corresponding data platforms is ever increasing. Within these citizen science platforms one “can identify a specific subtype of activities that can be termed ‘Geographical Citizen Science’[...]Geographical citizen science includes projects where the collection of location information is an integral part of the activity.” To visualize the spatiotemporal data of such initiatives WebMaps are being used (e. g. https://smartcitizen.me/, http://airqualityegg.com/, http://opensensemap.org/ ).   

These platforms aim to give their users a quick way to upload and view their own and others data. To do further analysis and get more out of these citizen data, it is often needed to download the data. This process removes possible analysis results from such platforms and restrict citizen scientists to the role of a sensor. Simple tools to interpret this data are nearly always missing. The citizen scientists are though only used to “Crowdsource” the data (see “Levels of Citizen Scientists”).  

This thesis aims to add functionalities for geostatistical analysis to OpenSenseMap(OSeM) and in doing so, the platform could be used for basic interpretation. In a first step this thesis will focus on the addition of a time-slider to enable the view upon the temporal aspect of OSeM data so that interpolation methods can be applied. In a next step it will add different ways for web based interpolation methods. In particular it will focus upon opencpu as a way to use R for this task.

For future work or if time allows it, it could be researched if the addition of such an interpretation tool helps to increase the attractiveness of OSeM as a citizen scientists platform.

Forced migrants (e.g. internally displaced people, refugees, asylum seekers) continuing arriving in cities all around the world. Forced migration is not a one-time phenomenon but a common and recurrent phenomenon in history. The recent European and African immigration crises are examples of this. As cities continue growing also does the information that is produced. The complexity of this information and the way of communicating it can present many challenges to newcomers, particularly, to those arriving in conditions of vulnerability as forced migrants (e.g. refugees and asylum seekers). This complexity can be addressed through different ways of visualizing information and interacting with it.

The Bachelor/Master student will work on one of the following two possible lines of research:

1. “Geovisualization of existent curated data to support refugees in their resettlement process.”

The Starthilfe platform has been created for a group of civil volunteers with information relevant to forced migrants about several topics (mobility, education, jobs, health, among others). This information is currently mainly text-based, and it is just accessible through the web platform, meaning it can just be accessed while being online.

The text-based data has geospatial descriptions however it has not being geolocated and then geo-visualized. Some of the specifics tasks to address during this bachelor/master thesis are:

• Retrieval of data from the Starthilfe website.

• Creation of spatial datasets based on the retrieved data.

• Geo-visualizing data and classifying it using the categories defined on the Starthilfe website (creation of layers, easy or common icons).

• Test the geo-visualization adaptation with refugees and asylum seekers

openEO develops an open API to connect R, Python and Javascript clients to big earth observation cloud back-ends in a simple and unified way. Back-ends process user-defined algorithms on remote sensing data sets within their cloud infrastructure. Although the communication between clients and back-ends is standardized by the openEO API, each back-end will implement the API to a different extent and will differ with regards to available processes and data sets. Therefore users should be able to search on a central platform for back-ends that fully support the users requirements. This includes the ability to search for back-ends by

• data sets, e.g. temporal extent, spatial extent, platform, sensor, bands or name,
• processes, e.g. by a process graph provided by the user,
• other back-end related metadata, e.g. API version, capabilities or costs.

Additionally, it could be useful for users to publish and share their algorithms as process graphs or user-defined functions (UDFs) on this central platform.

This thesis should explore, implement and evaluate one or multiple of these aspects. The scope of the thesis is designed to fit the requirements of a bachelor thesis. More information can be found in the openEO Hub GitHub repository.

Contact

• Edzer Pebesma - edzer.pebesma@uni-muenster.de
• Matthias Mohr - m.mohr@uni-muenster.de

Football games attract large numbers of visitors that need to perform various activities in games; this thesis could look into how to support those activities with dynamic situated signage, i.e. how to optimise evacuation in case of an emergency

We are looking for a highly motivated Master’s student to develop an campus navigation tool for the University of Muenster. 

The aim of the thesis is to develop a tool (mobile/web) that will enable navigation through the buildings of the University of Muenster, based on a linked open data graph. One idea is to select a building of the university (e.g. the library) and create an indoor navigation graph that accommodates the navigation abilities of different people. The tool should automatically suggest possible navigation paths to a person, based on his or her navigation abilities encoded as Linked Open Data. It is developed within the ongoing LIFE (Linked Data for eScience Services) project at the Institute for Geoinformatics.   

The LIFE project publishes resources as Linked Open Data, addressing all kinds of resources ranging from raw data to articles and books through maps. The goal of the project is to improve interdisciplinary collaboration in science and education through the sharing of research data. LIFE is funded by the German Research Foundation, and is jointly carried out by the Muenster Semantic Interoperability Lab (MUSIL) at Institute for Geoinformatics (http://ifgi.uni-muenster.de) and the University Library at University of Muenster.

The student is expected to start soon and finish the thesis in the SS 2014. Programming experience (desktop, mobile or web) is desirable. Familiarity with Semantic Web Technologies (RDF and SPARQL) is not mandatory. 

Interested? Please get in touch with us per e-mail at simonscheider@web.de  or degbelo@uni-muenster.de .

When giving directions, we often use gestures to communicate changes in orientation. We rotate our bodies, wave our hands, and shift our heads. Seeing these gestures helps the person receiving the instruction to keep his/her orientation in the newly constructed mental map of the environment. They are intuitively given and intuitively understood. Many, even across distinct cultures. Navigational systems could potentially build on these gestures to represent changes in direction, or point to an important landmark lying along the route.

Bachelor students will run user studies to pick an interesting gesture potentially helpful during navigation. They will propose a modification to the existing navigational systems which utilises the gesture to support the navigation.

Master students will first run user studies to explore and classify the variety of relevant gestures used during direction-giving. Based on this classification, students will develop a concept of a navigational system which utilises some of those gestures.

Some reading:

Hirtle, Stephen C. "The use of maps, images and “gestures” for navigation." Spatial Cognition II. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2000. 31-40.

Thanks to open web mapping libraries (e.g., Leaflet, Mapbox), creating Web Maps has become easier. The purpose of this thesis is to explore some of the factors (i.e., design steps) which lead to an easier re-use of Web Maps once they have been created. In particular, the thesis should explore design steps which lead to:
    - Easy plugging of new spatial datasets to existing Web Maps
    - Easy plugging of new temporal datasets to existing Web Maps

The evaluation of the ideas is expected to take place with one or more re-use scenarios of open geodata for cities (e.g., re-use of Web Maps for referendum data).

This thesis analyses the technical means that are necessary to integrate geospatial data services into e-Government applications. To do so, experts from both, the geospatial domain and the e-Government domain were interviewed to find use-cases which emerge from this integration. The examination of these use-cases showed, that an integration is only possible when basic requirements addressing the secure, traceable, and legally binding transport of messages are met. In e-Government infrastructures standardised transport technologies like OSCI were developed to meet these requirements. In order to satisfy the identified requirements and to enable legally binding, secure and traceable information exchange between services of SDIs and e-Government applications, thiswork applies the techniques of the transport protocol OSCI to a geospatial data service. The developed prototypical application is on the one hand capable of providing the necessary security, on the other hand it preserves the standards which are used in SDIs. This work shows that an integration of geospatial services into standardised e-Government applications is feasible, when all requirements are met.

Interoperability is the main challenge on the way to efficiently find and access spatial data on the web. Significant contributions regarding interoperability have been made by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), where web service standards to publish and download spatial data have been established. The OGCs GeoSPARQL specification targets spatial data on the Web as Linked Open Data (LOD) by providing a comprehensive vocabulary for annotation and querying. While OGC web service standards are widely implemented in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and offer a seamless service infrastructure, the LOD approach offers structured techniques to interlink and semantically describe spatial information. It is currently not possible to use LOD as a data source for OGC web services. In this paper we make a suggestion for technically linking OGC web services and LOD as a data source, and we explore and discuss its benefits. We describe and test an adapter that enables access to geographic LOD datasets from within OGC Web Feature Service (WFS), enabling most current GIS to access the Web of Data. We discuss performance tests by comparing the proposed adapter to a reference WFS implementation.

Due to the non-applicability of GPS devices and the higher need for accuracy, collecting indoor spatial data presents different challenges than mapping outdoor environments. Considering usability or technical requirements, existing approaches for data capture indoors are poorly suited for non-professional collaborators of volunteered geographic information (VGI) communities, such as OpenStreetMap (OSM). This work investigates an alternative to measuring what has been measured already. The idea is to extract map data from public escape plans by means of computer vision. An approach to automatically interpreting photos of escape plans on mobile devices is developed and evaluated.

Geo-spatial applications, for instance, geographic information systems (GIS) are increasingly realized as online platforms. Browser-based approaches facilitate broad accessibility and thus allow collaborative work. Regarding map based editors, collaboration is in most cases done asynchronous and does not support real-time concurrent editing. Many workflows, such as gathering data in case of a disaster could however benefit from allowing multiple users to simultaneously work together on the same dataset. A browser-based map editor, called Ethermap, was developed facilitating this kind of real-time interaction supported by means for increasing user awareness, an interactive version control, a well as explicit communication about geo-objects. This work reports on implications and limitations from several evaluation methods (focus group, user study, interviews, technical evaluation) indicating the importance of facilitating user awareness, as well as an increased efficiency, which can arise through real-time collaborative map editing.

This master thesis describes the evaluation of different image recognition algorithms. The aim is to find an appropriate technique to provide real time indoor Augmented Reality applications. Therefore, the promising approach of using existing infrastructure in the form of images or shop logos instead of markers is verified. Furthermore, the most appropriate algorithm in detection accuracy and time, SIFT, is tested for its real time abilities. Several techniques of how to improve the not sufficient calculation latency are tested and discussed. With the gained information a prototypical Augmented Reality that is based on image recognition is developed.

Along with the increasing proliferation and power of mobile devices, mobile maps (e.g. in pedestrian navigation systems) become both feasible and popular [Allen, 2000]. In contrast to the navigation mode in car navigation systems, pedestrians prefer route instructions based on salient objects [Kluge and Asche, 2012]. Although it is easy for users to get guided to a location, research suggests that the effects are negative. Moreover, users become device-focused and develop a reduced understanding of the environment [Munzer et al., 2006]. Accordingly, users might get lost in cases of inaccurate instructions or failures of the system as they only focus on the given route and turning-point instructions. Consequently, studies suggest that wayfinding and learning of the environment can be influenced through visual presentation modes with mobile applications [Munzer et al., 2012]. One type of information that are mostly not considered in mobile navigation solutions are landmarks. However, it has shown that landmarks are an important supportive element in wayfinding tasks [Golledge, 1999]. One of the key strengths of a map is that it can visualize features and their spatial relationships of a large area. Though, the limited space of mobile devices leads to a visualization of only a discrete view of an area. As consequence, the acquisition of spatial knowledge is impacted
with respect to accuracy and response time [Dillemuth, 2009]. Since the space of
the display is limited, landmarks are often outside of the displayed area. Accordingly, they have to be mapped on-screen to overcome this limitation. Research has already shown that displaying distant landmarks on-screen holds positive effects on supporting persons acquisition of directional knowledge that benefits spatial orientation [Li et al., 2014]. For the reason that the chosen visualization does not convey information about distance from the user’s position to the distant object a better visualization has to be provided. Research already provides several approaches to display distant objects on small displays (e.g. [Baudisch and Rosenholtz, 2003], [Gustafson et al., 2008], [Bertel et al., 2014]). However, given approaches are mainly focused on guiding a user to a distant
location. Therefore, this thesis will aim at adapting common approaches of research to display off-screen landmarks in order to investigate in what extent spatial orientation is supported while navigating through traffic.

Mobile devices have become increasingly popular in supporting people to find their ways in our daily lives. Providing navigation support is not only guiding a wayfinder to reach one or multiple destinations. More importantly, it should support the wayfinder’s spatial orientation to improve the wayfinder’s awareness of the environment. Research has suggested approaches to enhance a person’s spatial orientation while using maps on mobile devices by visualizing distant off-screen landmarks with landmark-indicating icons at the edge of the screen to indicate directions (LI, KORDA, RADTKE, SCHWERING 2014). An amendment to this design is to incorporate distance into the design and placement of landmark-indicating icons. Research explored various methods to visualize distant off-screen locations which are focusing of indicating distance and direction such as Halo (circles at the edge), Wedge (triangles at the edge) and Stretched (arrows at the edge) (BERTEL, KOHLBERG, LUTTER, SPENSBERGER 2014; BOLL, HENZE, 2011), but these methods are distinguishing the locations from each other just by using different colors. In context of categorized points of interest, it is useful to visualize different categories of points at the same time in different colors (such as automatic teller machines in a one and restaurants in another color). But global landmarks are unique and specifiable from each other and thus, it is not useful to create a category containing multiple global landmarks. Hence, using only different colors in combination with Halo, Wedge, and Stretched will not help users to identify distant off-screen landmarks. A new approach of visualizing identifiable landmark-indicating icons enhanced with distance information to those off-screen landmarks is subject of investigation.

This master thesis will continue previous research done by Dr. Judith Verstegen and her colleague, Dr. Floor Van der Hilst. I plan to evaluate the uncertainties that exist in an integrated economic-land use change model (MAGNET + PLUC models) and in which degree they might affect the greenhouse gas emission estimations in Brazil up to 2030 considering distinct land use change scenarios (e.g considering future biofuel demand and application of environmental mitigation policies). Since land use change indicators guide carbon stock aims in legislation, we ultimately plan to identify and access if adding uncertainties to the projected scenarios are significant when interpreting the indicators.

Various open data portals are currently emerging as catalogs for data being made open by public institutions. Enabling an efficient access to, and searching of these open datasets is still not fully understood. [1] proposed semantic APIs as a way of improving access to open data. The purpose of this thesis is to design and implement functionalities to enable spatial search through this API.

The thesis will involve two basic tasks:
  - addition of curated spatial datasets to the Open City Toolkit
  - development of an intuitive interface for the spatial query of these spatial datasets
 
The intuitiveness of the Spatial Query Interface could be tested, for example, through (sample) usability tests.

[1] Degbelo, A., Trilles, S., Kray, C., Bhattacharya, D., Schiestel, N., Wissing, J. and Granell, C. (2016) ‘Designing semantic APIs for open government data’, JeDEM - eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government, 8(2), pp. 21–58.

 

Predicting energy consumption for customers has many benefits. This prediction can help companies know what consumption future connections would have and it can help them decide whether to setup a grid in a community. This prediction is also important for solar mini-grid companies as it can help them setup mini-grids in new villages where they just have the data on the prospective customer houses. This prediction would be done based on the spatial characteristics of the houses and the consumption data of the already connected customers. These characteristics of customer houses are termed factors in this research. The aim of the project is to identify how these geospatial factors indicate and can help predict customer electricity consumption. E. ON Off Grid Solutions (EOGS) operates solar mini-grids in 8 villages in Tanzania. For this research, two villages namely Komolo and Temeke would be used as the case study areas. A regression model would be developed where the customer consumption would be predicted by the factors such as roof type, size, material etc. Here the consumption would act as the dependent variable and the factors would be the predictors. The performance of the model would be checked by comparing it with real customer consumption data. Once the quality is validated this model would be extended to other villages operated by EOGS as well.

Insurance companies that provide flood insurance often need real time information about flood events to verify insurance claims and to react accordingly. The current extend of a flood can be extracted from Sentinel-1 satellite images. The problem with this approach is that the images are only available every few days. Aim of this thesis will be to predict the future spatial development of the identified flooded areas by modeling the hydrological processes on the level of small catchments. A special focus will be on the data published by the German weather service on its open data portal. Both measurements of past weather conditions and the outputs of the short-term prognosis model COSMO-DE will be considered. The expected result is a workflow that allows predicting the development of the detected waterbodies over the next days.

3D flight route optimization for air-taxis in urban areas with Genetic Algorithms

openEO develops an open API to connect R, Python and Javascript clients to big Earth observation cloud back-ends in a simple and unified way. Back-ends process user-defined algorithms on remote sensing data sets - usually image-based - within their cloud infrastructure. An important aspect is to facilitate users to switch between back-ends easily while still getting consistent and comparable processing results. Back-ends use different IT infrastructure and software to process data although they share the same specification for processes and for communication between clients and back-ends: the openEO API. It is still necessary to ensure that processes comply to the specification. As a consequence, the results from back-ends are often not comparable by default and need to be checked for compliance with the specification. One way to ensure compliance is by processing a certain standardized, reference data sets and validating the results. The openEO project still has to select such data sets. Additionally, the differences in infrastructure and software may eventually lead to at least small differences in the processing results, either due to rounding in floating point arithmetic or implementation details. Therefore there needs to be a certain threshold that the results are allowed to differ. This thesis aims to solve the issues raised by

• defining which aspects an image-based data set need to fulfil for our validation purposes,
• selecting suitable image data sets for validation purposes,
• defining the concrete rules and a workflow for validation,
• and implementing a prototype for the specified workflow.

The scope of the thesis can be adapted to to fit the requirements of either a bachelor thesis or a master thesis. Some more information can be found in the corresponding openEO API GitHub issue.

Contact

• Edzer Pebesma - edzer.pebesma@uni-muenster.de
• Matthias Mohr - m.mohr@uni-muenster.de