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

gdalcubes ist eine am ifgi entwickelte C++ Bibliothek zur effizienten Erstellung und Verarbeitung von raumzeitlichen Data-Cubes aus größeren Satellitenbildsammlungen. Zur einfacheren Nutzbarkeit durch Datenwissenschaftler existiert zur Zeit lediglich eine Schnitstelle als R Paket. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, eine prototypische Schnittstelle zwischen gdalcubes und Python zu entwickeln. Dabei sollen verschiedene existierende Ansätze zur Verküpfung von Python und C++ (zum Beispiel pybind11, Cython, SWIG, Boost.Python) evaluiert werden. Schwerpunkte der Arbeit können nach Interesse besprochen werden.

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.

Copernicus is a European Earth observation programme with the goal “to provide accurate, timely and easily accessible information to improve the management of the environment, understand and mitigate the effects of climate change and en-sure civil security” (ESA 2015). Within Copernicus, a series of new satellite mis-sions will be executed to gather new satellite data. The first mission acquiring ra-dar data, called Sentinel-1, and the second mission gathering multi-spectral high-resolution data have already been launched.
In order to derive higher-level information products, the data needs to be pro-cessed, e.g. by using segmentation algorithms. In former times, the workflow in-cluded downloading the data, pre-processing it by selecting the spatial and/or temporal extent, and then running the actual segmentation process. The idea of rich data interfaces is that these processing facillities for deriving new information products are directly provided with the data in order to avoid downloading large raw datasets.
The aim of this bachelor thesis is to investigate how the OGC Web Processing Service (WPS) standard (Mueller & Pross, 2015), which defines a web service in-terface for geoprocessing functionality, can be utilized for such a rich data inter-face for the Copernicus. The expected outcomes are
(i) architecture patterns for coupling WPSs with copernicus data interfaces (ii) a prototypical implementation (iii) an evaluation of the concepts developed.
In order to successfully work on the thesis, good knowledge in Web technologies and Java programming is required as well as interest in remote sensing and EO-analysis. The work will be done in cooperation with the 52°North Open Source ini-tiative.
Literature:
Mueller, Matthias, and B. Pross. “OGC WPS 2.0 Interface Standard”. OpenGIS Implementation Standard, Version 2.0, OGC 14-065. (2014).
ESA. “Overview/Copernicus”. Available online at http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Overview3. (2015) Accessed 29/05/2015.
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Albert Remke (a.remke@52north.org) Dr. Christoph Stasch (c.stasch@52north.org)

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.

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.

Mit WebGIS NRW (webgis.nrw) existiert ein prototypisches WebGIS für den Bildungskontext, das auf modernen open Source Technoligien basiert (MapBox GL). Ziel der Arbeit ist die Weiterentwicklung des WebGIS nach User Centered Design Prinzipien und eine Evaluation der Usability.

The working group of remote sensing and spatial modelling at the institute of landscape ecology offers varoius topics for degree theses.
Please see https://www.uni-muenster.de/RemoteSensing/en/lehre/theses_topics/index.html

For decades, sketchmaps have been used as a tool for measuring spatial knowledge - i.e., for estimating how well participants know and understand some areas. However, evidence from psychological memory studies demonstrates, that drawing something can also be a good strategy to memorise a set of object. For instance, if you need to memorise the setting of a room, drawing the room as you see it is a better memorisation strategy than repeating the names of the objects verbally or in your head. This thesis will test whether drawing a sketch map is a good memorisation strategy for spatial environments and how this approach can be implemented in a gamified app. The problem is relevant for situations in which people must learn new spatial environments, e.g. to become taxi/delivery drivers, or when they move to a new city.
The thesis can be completed with focus on one of two aspects:
**Computational focus:** You will design a teaching app that (a) records the user's trajectory together with a list of landmarks that were visible along the route, and (b) after a delay, asks users to draw the area that they have travelled. Here the key problem may be to select routes and landmarks that the user should be asked to draw (based on the recorded trajectories).
**Evaluation focus:** You will design and conduct an experiment to evaluate the following research question: does drawing a sketchmap help people memorise the environment better, compared to alternative strategies? This does not require creating an app, and can be conducted as an in-situ experiment, or inside our Virtual Reality lab.

Nowadays, smartphones are an omnipresent companion in our day-to-day life. With the ability to sense our location, location based services (LBS) have become widely used applications (e.g. for navigation, recommender systems, social networks, games, dating apps or fitness tracking). Hence, service providers collect vast amounts of location data about their users. Based on this collected data, providers or malicious third parties who gain access to this data, can infer a lot of additional information (e.g. home, workplace, shopping habits, religious beliefs, political views etc.) about somebody and thus harm their privacy. Those actions are called inferences or inference attacks.

The aim of this thesis is to research possible inference strategies based on the literature and to implement a selection of those. If the topic is chosen as a MSc thesis, an experimental evaluation of different inference strategies is also required.

Due to the algorithmic nature of this topic, the student should be interested in programming and not afraid of digging into some aspects of spatio-temporal analysis. The student is free to choose their programming language and environment of choice. Ideally, the software would be implemented in Javascript, so the results could be integrated into an existing learning application that is currently under development as part of the SIMPORT project (https://simport.net/). The aim of this learning application is to educate users about the risks and consequences of sharing their location data.

Sketching parcel boundaries on drone images during participatory mapping sessions has the potential to accelerate the documentation of land rights in the Global South (see Stöcker et al, 2022). Nonetheless, there is still a lack of tools to automatically extract relevant information from the sketches and, more importantly, of an understanding of the techniques which work best and why. The goal of this thesis is to explore the merits of different computer vision techniques for the extraction of parcel boundaries and parcel IDs from hand-drawn sketches. Possible tasks include:

Selection of techniques: most promising techniques (e.g. machine/deep learning models) to compare can be selected based on a review of the existing literature. The comparison will use an approach not involving a machine learning technique as a baseline.  

Selection of evaluation criteria: several criteria were summarized in (Crommelinck et al, 2019, Minaee et al, 2021), and a few will be selected (e.g. accuracy, speed, completeness) for the comparison task.

Comparison: the different techniques will be compared empirically using data collected from participatory mapping activities in Benin and Ruanda. The comparison could shed some light on architecture selection (what is the minimal neural architecture to achieve a given extraction performance?), feature engineering (which features lead to better performance?), and transferability (to which extent do models trained with data from a scenario perform well in other scenarios?).

References

Crommelinck, S., Koeva, M., Yang, M. Y., & Vosselman, G. (2019). Robust object extraction from remote sensing data. arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.12586.

Minaee, S., Boykov, Y. Y., Porikli, F., Plaza, A. J., Kehtarnavaz, N. and Terzopoulos, D. (2021) ‘Image segmentation using deep learning: A survey’, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, pp. 1–1. doi: 10.1109/TPAMI.2021.3059968.

Stöcker, C., Degbelo, A., Kundert, K., Oosterbroek, E. P., Houedji, I. A., Mensah, G. K. S., Gambadatoun, B. and Schwering, A. (2022) ‘Accelerating participatory land rights mapping with SmartLandMaps tools: Lessons learnt from Benin’, in FIG 2022. Warsaw, Poland.

Additional Readings

Klemm, S., Jiang, X. and Risse, B. (2018) ‘Deep distance transform to segment visually indistinguishable merged objects’, in Brox, T., Bruhn, A., and Fritz, M. (eds) German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR 2018). Stuttgart, Germany, pp. 422–433. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-12939-2_29.

Contacts

Auriol Degbelo (auriol.degbelo@uni-muenster.de)

Benjamin Risse (b.risse@uni-muenster.de)

Hölscher et al. showed that human navigation in urban environments is "situated", i.e., that people modify their wayfinding plan as they spot new shortcuts while walking through the environment. Their study was conducted in the city centre of Freiburg. This thesis topic will aim at replicating these results (a) in Münster, and (b) in Virtual Reality. The technical challenge is to build a simplified virtual reality representation of a portion of Muenster. The experimental challenge is to involve two groups navigating the same space in the real and in the virtual world.

Reference: Hölscher et al. (2011): Would you follow your own route description?

Annotations of visualizations is a useful task during exploratory data analysis. As illustrated in [1,2], users may want to record trends, clusters, distributions or outliers found on components of a geovisualization during a data analysis session. A key challenge here is that of summarizing the annotations produced by various users during their exploration activities. This thesis will look into computational and/or graphical means of producing these summaries. Tasks include: 

Prototyping: design of a web-based or mobile prototype to record annotations of web maps graphically.

Data collection: here graphical annotation of web-maps will be generated. These annotations could be synthetic or real, depending on the scope of the thesis. 

Summarization: this design, implementation and evaluation of summary approaches. 

References

[1] Heer, J., Viégas, F. B. and Wattenberg, M. (2009) ‘Voyagers and voyeurs: supporting asynchronous collaborative visualization’, Communications of the ACM, 52(1), pp. 87–97. doi: 10.1145/1435417.1435439.

[2] Lai, P.-C. and Degbelo, A. (2021) ‘A comparative study of typing and speech for map metadata creation’, in Partsinevelos, P., Kyriakidis, P., and Kavouras, M. (eds) Proceedings of the 24th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science (AGILE 2021), pp. 1–12. doi: 10.5194/agile-giss-2-7-2021.

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

The mapping of biotope types plays an essential role in the assessment and monitoring of ecosystems. Since an extensive collection of the required parameters in the field is not feasible, remote sensing (mainly high-resolution RGB and NIR data) is commonly used. Usually the data is analyzed manually through visual interpretation by trained analysts. The aim of this project is to develop and evaluate methods for an automated segmentation (delineation) and classification of relevant biotope types at the spatial scale of established classification schemes.

Guiding questions include:

• What are the identifiable features (e.g. spatial, spectral, temporal patterns) that are commonly used in the visual interpretation of remote sensing images to detect and classify biotope types, and can these features be integrated in models for an automatic classification?
• How can deep learning and “classical” machine learning support the automation of classifying biotope types in remote sensing images?
• What are the main features that are learned by well-trained machine learning models for identifying biotope types as compared to the features used in the visual interpretation by human analysts?
• Which biotope types can or cannot be reliably classified, what are the main difficulties and which additional data might be helpful in increasing classification accuracy?

The data basis consists of high-resolution remote sensing images (10 cm, color infrared and RGB) as well as freely available medium resolution satellite data (especially Sentinel). A comprehensive reference data set of manually digitized biotope types is available for model training and validation. The practical work is expected to be conducted reproducibly in R.  

The research will be conducted through two master theses (geoinformatics and landscape ecology) in close collaboration. The specific tasks and research questions of both theses will be discussed between the students and supervisors.

Supervisors: Christian Knoth (ifgi), Hanna Meyer and Jan Lehman (ILÖK),   Reinhard Silvers (Hansa Luftbild)

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).

Buildings of the future will have to be much more flexible than they are now. One envisioned possibility is that building interiors will change their shapes depending on the current context of use, personal preference of their users, or tasks that the occupants have to perform within them at the given moment. While this may sound like a distant vision of the future, Virtual Reality equipment already allows us to study such scenarios today.

In this thesis, you will design a Virtual Reality building that participants will explore in Head-Mounted Displays. The VR system will monitor spatio-temporal data of the building user, and create the remaining (yet unvisited) parts of the building in response to this data, before the user gets there.

The specific context of this thesis can be adjusted based on your interests. One possibility would be to detect navigational confusion based on the occupant's walking trajectory, and - in response - provide a navigationally simplified space in the next room that the occupant is going to visit. Another possibility is to detect loss of attention in a virtual museum gallery, and - in response - provide the user with a more exciting space in the next room. The application should be evaluated in a simple user study.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has published the Web Processing Ser-vices (WPS) specification, which defines a standard interface to geoprocessing re-sources.
A typical WPS use case is to provide functional views on very large data sets such as filter algorithms or aggregations. I.e. in those cases it is not necessary to download large data volumes and to do the processing locally but to invoke the processing capabilities of the data store remotely and to download just the re-sults, which are typically of smaller size.
Aim is to achieve plug-and-play interoperability between Client software and re-mote processing engines, as to ease access to arbitrary geocomputing capabili-ties.
The standard is intentionally kept generic to cover a variety of geoprocessing functionality ranging from simple geometric operators, such as buffering, to com-plex environmental models. But this generic nature also imposes challenges to achieving full interoperability between client and server software implementing the WPS standard.
A comprehensive study that evaluates the interoperabilty between different WPS software components is currently missing and is the core aim of this thesis. Therefore, a survey of related literature and projects on WPS should be done, in-cluding a review of the software available. Afterwards, concepts and methods for testing the pragmatic interoperability between geoprocessing web services and clients need to be developed. In a third step, the test environment has to be set up and tests have to be executed. Finally, the test results have to be evaluated.
The student will cooperate with 52°North staff, who is also active in the WPS standardization activities at OGC. Results of the thesis will be presented at an in-ternational conference and should help to improve the interoperability of geopro-cessing services. Interested students should have at least basic knowledge of Web technologies and OGC standards (SII lecture) as well as basic knowledge about testing methods (e.g. as taught in software engineering lectures).
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Albert Remke (a.remke@52north.org) Dr. Christoph Stasch (c.stasch@52north.org)

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
 

Mobilität der Arbeitnehmenden in der Samtgemeinde Artland

Diese Bacheloarbeit ist als enge Kooperation mit der Samtgemeinde Artland in der Nähe von Osnabrück geplant.  Es ist angedacht, basierend auf Befragungen von Pendler*innen Ideen und evtl. einfach Prototypen für ein Pendlerportal entwickelt werden, das die lokalen Besonderheiten und ländliche Charakteristika mitberücksichtigt.  Relevante Aktivitäten hierbei sind u.a. die im folgenden Text genannten Punkte.

Analyse der Ist-Situation

In großen und mittleren Betrieben in der Samtgemeinde Artland haben sich „Pendlergemeinschaften“ gebildet. Es wird angenommen, dass diese vor allem von jüngeren Beschäftigten (teilweise in Ausbildung) in Anspruch genommen werden.

Welche Wegstrecken legen die Arbeitnehmenden in ausgewählten Betrieben zurück? Welche „Überschneidungen“ gibt es in Bezug auf die Route und die Fahrzeiten?

Könnten die Personen für einen Teil der Strecke bzw. für eine Hin- oder Rückfahrt auf den ÖPNV ausweichen? Wie hoch ist die Bereitschaft Personen aus dem eigenen Betrieb und darüber hinaus mitzunehmen?

Fragestellung

Eine Untersuchung der Bewegungsprofile von Beschäftigten in ausgewählten Unternehmen (zum Beispiel Deutsches Institut für Lebensmitteltechnik (DIL), Christliches Krankenhaus Quakenbrück, Delkeskamp Verpackungswerke, The Family Butchers (ehem. Kemper Fleischwaren) und Rebotec) kann zu einem Piloten für das geplante Pendlerportal im Modul Mobilität auf der Plattform Artland smart entwickelt werden. Zusätzlich ist eine Sensibilisierung dieser Zielgruppe sowie die Verknüpfung zu weiteren Angeboten im Bereich Mobilität (E-Bike-Verleih, Carsharing und Angebote im ÖPNV) denkbar.

Für den Betrieb als Arbeitgeber könnten Fragestellungen in Hinblick auf die Auswirkungen auf das Betriebsklima sowie auf den Bereich Recruiting von Interesse sein.

Hintergrund

Das Projekt „Artland smart - Vernetztes Wissen im ländlichen Raum“ wird durch das niedersächsische Förderprogramm „Zukunftsräume Niedersachsen“ finanziert. Die Projektlaufzeit beträgt drei Jahre (bis Anfang September 2023). Im Vordergrund steht die Stärkung des Mittelzentrums Quakenbrück unter Einbeziehung der Mitgliedsgemeinden Nortrup, Menslage und Badbergen. In der Samtgemeinde Artland im nördlichen Osnabrücker Land leben ca. 24.000 Menschen.

Im Sommer 2022 startet ein internationaler Masterstudiengang am Deutschen Institut für Lebensmitteltechnik in Quakenbrück. Die Samtgemeinde möchte mit der digitalen Darstellung sowie der Förderung von Angeboten im Bereich Gastronomie, Mobilität und Wohnraum ein attraktives Umfeld für die Studierenden bieten sowie gleichzeitig die lokalen Anbieter unterstützen und langfristig für Einheimische und Gäste ein attraktives Angebot erhalten und ausbauen.

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.

In their seminal paper Wiener et al. (2009) defined the taxonomy of human wayfinding tasks. The taxonomy is based on the type of knowledge possessed by the navigator. However, it did not differentiate between any subcategories of the "Path Following" task. In other words, according to the taxonomy, there is no difference between (a) knowing your route without knowing anything about the wider surrounding enviornment, and (b) knowing your route AND knowing about the wider surrounding enviornment.

Schwering et al. (2017) argued that there are substantial differences between such two tasks and that they deserve to be distinguished in an updated taxonomy.

The goal of this thesis will be to test the hypothesis that following the same route, with the same knowledge about the route, is a cognitively different task depending on whether the navigator has, or does not have, survey knowledge about the broader envionment.

Wiener, J. M., Büchner, S. J., & Hölscher, C. (2009). Taxonomy of human wayfinding tasks: A knowledge-based approach. Spatial Cognition & Computation, 9(2), 152–165.

Schwering, A., Krukar, J., Li, R., Anacta, V. J., & Fuest, S. (2017). Wayfinding Through Orientation. Spatial Cognition & Computation, 17(4), 273–303. doi:10.1080/13875868.2017.1322597

Geospatial research workflows today are completely digitised. More and more observational data is available in open repositories and analysed with open software. The processing is increasingly moved to scalable cloud infrastructures, which often build on free and open source software. A downside is that the digitisation, data volume, online processing, and complexity of software environments make it harder for researchers to understand, reproduce, and build upon each others work. The executable research compendium (ERC) developed by the project Opening Reproducible Research (o2r, https://o2r.info) attempts to lower the barriers for inspecting and manipulating published research workflows in the geosciences. In this thesis, the student will explore how common geospatial web services can be packaged as part of a research compendium. These web services should comprise data services (e.g. a WFS, SOS, WCS), view services (e.g. a WMS) and  processing services (e.g WPS, openEO). The student will re-use published or develop two to three example workflows using based on these web services. The ERC and supporting tools currently only support a single Docker container for capturing the runtime environment. A core challenge of this work will be to find out how multiple containers may be created and executed without additional burden on the author of a research paper during the creation of ERC, and without introducing security risks in the networking between the containers.

Affinity to command line tools and solving hard problems using existing software tools is a prerequisite for this thesis. The student will get to know a variety of common geospatial web services (e.g. Geoserver, SciDB, 52N WPS, pyWPS) and Docker during the course of this work.

For decades, sketchmaps have been used as a tool for measuring spatial knowledge - i.e., for estimating how well participants know and understand some areas. However, evidence from psychological memory studies demonstrates, that drawing something can also be a good strategy to memorise a set of object. For instance, if you need to memorise the setting of a room, drawing the room as you see it is a better memorisation strategy than repeating the names of the objects verbally or in your head. This thesis will test whether drawing a sketch map is a good memorisation strategy for spatial environments and how this approach can be implemented in a gamified app. The problem is relevant for situations in which people must learn new spatial environments, e.g. to become taxi/delivery drivers, or when they move to a new city.
The thesis can be completed with focus on one of two aspects:
**Computational focus:** You will design a teaching app that (a) records the user's trajectory together with a list of landmarks that were visible along the route, and (b) after a delay, asks users to draw the area that they have travelled. Here the key problem may be to select routes and landmarks that the user should be asked to draw (based on the recorded trajectories).
**Evaluation focus:** You will design and conduct an experiment to evaluate the following research question: does drawing a sketchmap help people memorise the environment better, compared to alternative strategies? This does not require creating an app, and can be conducted as an in-situ experiment, or inside our Virtual Reality lab.

Nowadays, smartphones are an omnipresent companion in our day-to-day life. With the ability to sense our location, location based services (LBS) have become widely used applications (e.g. for navigation, recommender systems, social networks, games, dating apps or fitness tracking). Hence, service providers collect vast amounts of location data about their users. Based on this collected data, providers or malicious third parties who gain access to this data, can infer a lot of additional information (e.g. home, workplace, shopping habits, religious beliefs, political views etc.) about somebody and thus harm their privacy. Those actions are called inferences or inference attacks.

The aim of this thesis is to research possible inference strategies based on the literature and to implement a selection of those. If the topic is chosen as a MSc thesis, an experimental evaluation of different inference strategies is also required.

Due to the algorithmic nature of this topic, the student should be interested in programming and not afraid of digging into some aspects of spatio-temporal analysis. The student is free to choose their programming language and environment of choice. Ideally, the software would be implemented in Javascript, so the results could be integrated into an existing learning application that is currently under development as part of the SIMPORT project (https://simport.net/). The aim of this learning application is to educate users about the risks and consequences of sharing their location data.

What is the optimal land use, if we want to minimize deforestation and simultaneously maximize agricultural return? Finding that land use allocation is in most locations impossible, because the objectives are conflicting. On the other hand, it is possible to find compromise solutions that satisfy both objectives to some extent. Current techniques to solve that land use allocation problem belong to the cathegory Artificial Intelligence and are called Multi-Objective optimizations, for example Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithms. Spatial input data is used for the optimization, and the question arises, which representation shall be used: Fields (raster data) or objects (vector data). For computational efficiency, the chosen spatial input data for the optimization is usually of raster type instead of vector type. Nevertheless, raster representation can yield disadvantages compared to vector representation: Information regarding the topology is lost and data inaccuracies can be generated during the conversion process.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the impact of using different data representations in land use allocation optimization. Depending on the student's interest and background, possible specialisations can be to

1) Analyse the optimization results generated with raster data and vector data on different spatial scales with real data.

2) Implement GPU-accelerated computations of the objective functions and compare the algorithm performance per representation type. 

Despite substantial progress in digital technologies, and the increasing adoption of digital technologies for the collection of land-related data (see e.g. ArcGIS Field Maps, Qfield, or MAST), information related to land (e.g. citizen-to-city-council-communication, purchase transaction, inheritance transactions) is still managed manually. This is a missed opportunity and this thesis will use a Research through Design (RtD) approach to explore possible futures of digital land rights management. RtD is a “type of research practice focused on improving the world by making new things that disrupt, complicate or transform the current state of the world” (Zimmerman and Forlizzi 2014). Tasks include:  

Requirements specification: derive requirements for applications for map-based land rights data management through scenario formulation (for an example of scenario-based study, see Degbelo and Somaskantharajan, 2020)

Implementation: develop a mobile app (frontend + backend) that implements some of the requirements. The mobile app may be a simple responsive web app or use a framework for mobile app development

Evaluation: validation of design decisions of the mobile app through interviews with domain experts and/or additional users. 

References

Degbelo, A. and Somaskantharajan, S. (2020) ‘Speech-based interaction for map editing on mobile devices: a scenario-based study’, in Alt, F., Schneegass, S., and Hornecker, E. (eds) Mensch und Computer 2020. Magdeburg, Germany: ACM, pp. 343–347. doi: 10.1145/3404983.3409996.

Zimmerman, J. and Forlizzi, J. (2014) ‘Research through design in HCI’, in Olson, J. S. and Kellogg, W. A. (eds) Ways of Knowing in HCI. New York, New York, USA: Springer New York, pp. 167–189. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-0378-8_8.

Links

ArcGIS Field Maps: https://www.esri.com/de-de/arcgis/products/arcgis-field-maps/overview 

Qfield: https://qfield.org/ 

MAST: https://www.land-links.org/tool-resource/mast-technology-2/

Evaluative images of cities (i.e. composite maps capturing citizens’ perceptions of areas in the cities) are a rich source of qualitative data that can be used by urban planners to understand how people relate to neighborhoods of their cities. They were proposed by Nasar (1990), who suggested deriving them through interviews. Recently Barros et al (2022) proposed a web-mapping approach to create city images computationally, with promising results. This thesis will build upon this and explore techniques to compare two evaluative city images computationally. Tasks include:

Data collection: collect data about how people perceive areas of a city (e.g. Münster) concerning the five dimensions originally suggested by Nasar (i.e. naturalness, upkeep, openness, historical significance, and openness).

Development of a comparison module for evaluative city images: at least two directions are possible.

• A) The module helps assess and visually communicate similarities/differences between two evaluative city images. Possible applications of the comparison module include: assessment of the temporal variability (collection of two evaluative city images at different points in time), the spatial variability (comparison of evaluative city images from two different neighborhoods, or cities), the statements made by the city images about the mapped regions, and the (spatial) accuracies of the city images.

• B) The module relates an evaluative city image (qualitative data) with quantitative data available about the mapped neighbourhoods to identify conflicting statements and converging evidence for urban facts.

Evaluation: aspects to be evaluated could include the computational performance (how the module performs as the areas mapped by participants grow), the effectiveness of the visual communication of differences (how easy it is for users to perceive similarities and differences), or the usefulness of the comparison module for urban planners (what experts say about integrating the module into their workflows).

Readings

Barros, M. S., Degbelo, A. and Filomena, G. (2022) ‘Evaluative image 2.0: A web mapping approach to capture people’s perceptions of a city’, Transactions in GIS, 26(2), pp. 1116–1139. doi: 10.1111/tgis.12867.

Nasar, J. L. (1990) ‘The evaluative image of the city’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 56(1), pp. 41–53. doi: 10.1080/01944369008975742.

Demos

eImage Canvas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8dtaum_Xu0

eImage Viewer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-MDp9YItnc

Contact

Auriol Degbelo (auriol.degbelo@uni-muenster.de )

Simge Oktay (soezdalo@uni-muenster.de )   

Hölscher et al. showed that human navigation in urban environments is "situated", i.e., that people modify their wayfinding plan as they spot new shortcuts while walking through the environment. Their study was conducted in the city centre of Freiburg. This thesis topic will aim at replicating these results (a) in Münster, and (b) in Virtual Reality. The technical challenge is to build a simplified virtual reality representation of a portion of Muenster. The experimental challenge is to involve two groups navigating the same space in the real and in the virtual world.

Reference: Hölscher et al. (2011): Would you follow your own route description?

WI-FI is a promising technique to monitor traffic in different scenarios. As discussed in [2], WiFi sensing is beneficial because 1) low-cost, 2) not intrusive and 3) sensitive to lighting conditions. First tests done in [1] in Münster have yielded encouraging results for the monitoring of cars, but much is still needed to grasp the potential of the technique.  The aim of this thesis is to advance our understanding of the benefits and costs of WI-FI sensing for city traffic monitoring.

Tasks include:

• Scenario definition, system setup and data collection
• Prototype implementation for automated vehicle detection and classification
• Evaluation of the classification accuracies

Possible directions include (non-exhaustive list)

• Detection of vehicles on multiple lanes using Wi-Fi (e.g. two lanes, one direction; two lanes, two directions)
• Effect of the spatial distance between sending/receiving units on the classification accuracy

• Effect of the temporal resolution of the measurements on the classification accuracy
• Effect of the use of channel state information (CSI) on the classification accuracy
• Measurement of velocity and direction of vehicles (e.g. through the addition of additional sender/receiving units)
• WIFI-Sensing for real-time traffic monitoring
• Designing and developing prototype for real life implementation.

References

[1] Gupta, S., Hamzin, A. and Degbelo, A. (2018) ‘A low-cost open hardware system for collecting traffic data using Wi-Fi signal strength’, Sensors, 18(11), p. 3623. doi: 10.3390/s18113623.

[2] Ma, Y., Zhou, G. and Wang, S. (2019) ‘WiFi sensing with channel state information’, ACM Computing Surveys, 52(3), pp. 1–36. doi: 10.1145/3310194.

The number of web-based geographic information systems (GIS) that are publicly available on the internet has increased manifold in recent years. The wide range of applications includes tools for planning outdoor trips, virtual globes for educational purposes as well as interactive dashboards to visualise and track reported cases of COVID-19 in real time. Despite this development, there still is a lack of wider public involvement in spatial decision-making problems. While the technological difficulties of accessing and working with GIS on the web have largely been solved, we still have not yet witnessed the take-off of web-based public participation GIS (PPGIS). Although research in this area has shown that public use of GIS is beneficial for citizen participation in urban planning processes, the number of applications is relatively small and oftentimes, the functionality is very limited, particularly with respect to deeper analysis.

Part of the reason may be the lack of research on how to best leverage GIS technologies to foster citizen participation. In addition,many users struggle when interacting with WebGIS as various usability evaluations have shown. Many tools are designed for experts that have a background in GIS, work with these applications on a daily basis and have participated in classes or studied detailed instructions to perform complex analysis task. However, many users are unfamiliar with GIS tools but still expect a pleasant user experience similar to other tools on the internet that do not require extensive knowledge prior to interaction. Assessing the requirements, providing the appropriate tools, and evaluating the usability is thus crucial for involving the public in spatial decision-making problems.

The goal of this thesis is thus to design, implement and evaluate a public participation WebGIS that enables lay people to make use of deeper analysis features such as reachability or catchment area computations. Based on requirements collected from city planners and citizens, a prototypical system realising (part of) the needed analysis features will be implemented. It is understood, that this implementation would build upon existing systems or libraries (such as Ethermap or Leaflet). In order to evaluate the developed WebGIS, a user study should be conducted. Promising domains for the participatory WebGIS include, for example:

• bikeability (where to place bike parking, which roads to close for cars, where to add bike lanes),
• energy transformation (where to place wind turbines, batteries, charging stations, etc.), or
• noise pollution (where to reduce speed, where to ban noise-producing entities, where to add noise-reducing measures)

​There is potential for collaboration with ongoing projects at sitcome (such as GECCO), with the City of Münster and the newly founded StadtLaborMünster.

Data cubes are an efficient representation for spatiotemporal data as from Earth observation satellites. By multidimensional chunking, they allow highly parallel execution of complex analysis such as time series change detection. The aim of the thesis is to create an architecture that allows for scaling such operations in a distributed computing environment using containerized processing (Docker) and tools for container orchestration such as Kubernetes. A prototypical implementation as extension to the gdalcubes library shall be developed and used for a detailed analysis of the scalability of the proposed architecture.

Assessing and improving the transferability of machine learning models is an important task for the large-scale mapping of environmental observations. In the context of spatial modelling and remote sensing, the transferability of a model relates to its ability to validly predict in geographic regions where training data is not available. These regions can be identified using the Area of Applicability method currently published and developed in the Uebersat Project (Meyer et al. 2021).
Understanding the influence of the spatial distribution of training data and predictor interactions on the models transferability is crucial for the interpretation of predictions. In Barbiero et al. (2020) the models transferability and generalization from different datasets was tested using a convex hull approach and related to structural characteristics of the dataset (e.g. correlations between predictors).
In this context, we offer a Master Thesis dealing with the following topics:

* Reproduce ideas of Barbiero et al. (2020) and assess model transferability with the Area of Applicability
* Complement the concept by using spatial data and refer model transferability to spatially intrinsic aspects of the data

The Thesis will be part of the Ubersat Project and conducted in a collaborative team from ILOEK and IFGI.

Literature:
Barbiero, Pietro, Giovanni Squillero, and Alberto Tonda. 2020. “Modeling Generalization in Machine Learning: A Methodological and Computational Study.” arXiv:2006.15680 [Cs, Stat], June. https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.15680.

Meyer, Hanna and Edzer Pebesma. 2021. “Predicting into Unknown Space? Estimating the Area of Applicability of Spatial Prediction Models.” Methods in Ecology and Evolution, June, 2041–210X.13650. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13650.

Anfahrtskizzen sind Karten, die optimiert sind, um die Route aus verschiedenen Richtungen zu einem bestimmten Zielort zu zeigen. Zumeist sind sie manuell erstellt, wobei

• Informationen selektiv ausgewählt wurden
• schematisiert dargestellt wurden

Die Arbeit soll Anfahrtsskizzen analysieren und die dahinterliegenden Mechanismen extrahieren, wie Anfahrtsskizzen erfolgreich visualisiert werden können. Die Ergebnisse werden systematisch in einer Nutzerstudie getestet.

Beispiele für Anfahrtsskizzen:

http://www.hautarztpraxis-muenster.de

http://www.allwetterzoo.de

http://www.merckfinck.de

http://www.dechaneiviertel.de

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

Powerful methods in an area called "dynamic geometry" provide a rapid way of solving a wide range of spatial reasoning problems. For example, as a user manipulates some shapes (circles, lines, points) in an "intelligent" sketch, the sketch automatically updates itself to maintain certain spatial constraints (e.g. lines being tangent to circles, lines being parallel to each other, and so on).

In medicine these shapes could represent different types of cells that have been automatically recognised from images of a tissue section, and the task could be to determine whether the cells are cancerous (histopathology). In geographic information systems these shapes could represent streets, buildings, and landmarks recognised from satellite images or directly from a hand-drawn sketch.

In this thesis project you will be:

• extending the spatial language of dynamic geometry to work with common-sense qualitative spatial relations (near, left of, inside, etc.)
• integrating dynamic geometry into a knowledge representation (artificial intelligence) framework

You will then use this enhanced technology for a range of exciting tasks, such as:

• improving computer-based image recognition by automatically correcting errors based on knowledge about objects in the domain
• providing new ways of interacting with complex data using "intelligent" sketches

Through this research project you will develop skills and experience in the application of methods in artificial intelligence (AI). You will be introduced to the necessary tools and existing projects to build on. No prior experience with methods in AI is necessary (you will be given considerable support in this area).
 

"Learning by induction" is the ability to take a number of observations or examples and discover rules that account for the observations - it's the ability to generalise from examples.

Being able to generalise spatial patterns from observations is essential for artificial intelligence systems to perform a variety of tasks in a flexible and robust way. We don't want to tell the computer system exactly how to solve every specific problem it will encounter. Instead, we want to give it some examples and have the system use common sense and background knowledge to figure out ways of solving new problems that have a similar structure.

In this thesis project you will be:

(a) integrating a new powerful "common sense" spatial reasoning method called Enhanced Geometric Constraint Solving within a more general artificial intelligence framework for inductive spatial learning;

(b) evaluating the system in a range of exciting applications in geographic information science, architectural design, cognitive psychology (analogical reasoning), and medicine (histopathology).

Through this project you will develop skills and experience in the application of methods in artificial intelligence (AI). You will be introduced to the necessary tools and existing projects to build on. No prior experience with methods in AI is necessary (you will be given considerable support in this area).
 

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
 

User experience of geospatial products is increasingly studied (see e.g. [1, 2]), but models  describing the results of these studies for further reuse are still lacking. The aim of this thesis is to provide an approach to systematically build such models. Building these models is key to realize intelligent geovisualizations [3]. Tasks include: 

Task1: Development of a prototype to collect data about the user experience of different types of map-based applications. This prototype can be mobile or not, and could investigate, for instance, the impact of color palettes, mean spacing between elements (e.g. menu items), size of the elements (e.g. icons, labels), visual hierarchy and the cross-device validity of the findings.

Task2: Conduct user studies to collect data about the user experience of a geospatial application under different conditions.

Task3: Model-fitting (i.e. find the mathematical function that describes the model most adequately). 

References

[1] Degbelo, A. and Somaskantharajan, S. (2020) ‘Speech-based interaction for map editing on mobile devices: a scenario-based study’, in Alt, F., Schneegass, S., and Hornecker, E. (eds) Mensch und Computer 2020. Magdeburg, Germany: ACM, pp. 343–347. doi: 10.1145/3404983.3409996.

[2] Einfeldt, L. and Degbelo, A. (2021) ‘User interface factors of mobile UX: A study with an incident reporting application’, in Paljic, A., Peck, T., Braz, J., and Bouatouch, K. (eds) Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2021) - Volume 2: HUCAPP. Online: SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, pp. 245–254. doi: 10.5220/0010325302450254.

[3] Degbelo, A. and Kray, C. (2018) ‘Intelligent geovisualizations for open government data (vision paper)’, in Banaei-Kashani, F., Hoel, E. G., Güting, R. H., Tamassia, R., and Xiong, L. (eds) 26th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. Seattle, Washington, USA: ACM Press, pp. 77–80. doi: 10.1145/3274895.3274940.

Reading

Miniukovich, A. and Marchese, M. (2020) ‘Relationship between visual complexity and aesthetics of webpages’, in Bernhaupt, R. et al. (eds) Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Honolulu, Hawaii, USA: ACM, pp. 1–13. doi: 10.1145/3313831.3376602.

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.

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.

The OpenSeaMap project (http://www.openseamap.org/) is based on the OpenStreetMap technology and aims at providing sea maps. It offers a very broad range of nautical charts and information about features such as beacons, buoys and other navigation aids.

Complementary to static information (e.g. locations of buoys and navigation aids), there is also a need for providing dynamic information such as weather data and water level measurements. Currently a first implementation for integrating dynamic observation data is in place. However, the existing implementation is not based on open standards so that the integration of new data sources is a rather cumbersome task.

Within this thesis, a student shall develop an approach, how the integration of dynamic observation data into the OpenSeaMap platform can be achieved. For this purpose relevant technologies (e.g. OGC Sensor Web Enablement) need to be evaluated. Based on the evaluation results and potentially identified gaps, an according concept shall be developed. In a final step the resulting concept shall be implemented and evaluated.

Landmarks are commonly used in human daily communication of wayfinding instructions. Research has suggested the potential of increasing efficiency by using landmarks in wayfinding instructions. Further studies investigated the use of landmarks in wayfinding instructions in terms of their location: Global, local at decision point, and local along a route. While the locations of landmarks have been introduced, their specific effects are not clear yet. This study aims to test wayfinding instructions with landmarks at specific locations: landmarks at decision point or landmarks along route. This study includes two major objectives as follows:

1. Constructing wayfinding instructions with landmarks at specific locations in visual or verbal forms;
2. Testing the effect of each type of instructions on aspects of wayfinding such as orientation, accuracy, and configuration.

This research contributes to a more comprehensive study on landmarks with respect to their locations on route

Das Ziel ist es, die Tauglichkeit des STRIDE-Threat-Modells für Public Display Systeme anhand einer oder mehrerer Fallstudien zu untersuchen. Mögliche Untersuchungsobjekte sind u.a. das ifgi-Foyer-System, Bankautomaten, Fahrkarten- automaten oder interaktive Bildschirme in Kaufhäusern (z.B. Terminals an denen CDs zur Probe gehört werden können.). Lassen sich "alle" Gefahren für die Privatsphäre der Benutzer (Privacy Threats) durch die Kategorien im STRIDE-Modell beschreiben oder oder gibt es "überflüssige" STRIDE-Kategorien? Wie kann das STRIDE-Modell genutzt werden um Gefahren bzw. Risiken gezielt zu adressieren?

Das Ziel ist die Entwicklung und Evaluation ein kartenbasierten Content-Management-System (CMS) für das iPED Toolkit [1]. Dieses CMS soll dazu genutzt werden, Objekte in einer graph- basierten Datenbank zu verwalten. Diese Objekte entsprechen realen Orten, die auf einer Karte verortet werden sollen. Zu jedem Ort sollen zusätzliche Daten (z.B. Fotos oder Videos) abgespeichert werden können. Zur Umsetzung des CMS sollen moderne Technologien wie HTML5, CSS3, AJAX und Responsive Design zum Einsatz kommen. Zur Evaluation der Umsetzung soll in einer kleinen Studie die Task-Completion-Time bzw. Error-Rate der Benutzer ermittelt werden.

[1] Ostkamp, M., Kray, C. Supporting Design, Prototyping, and Evaluation of Public Display Systems. Proc. EICS ’14, ACM (2014), to appear.

People are often get lost inside buildings. One reason for this circumstance is the situation if space is perceivable, but not reachable. This situation is known as the visibility accessibility problem. This setting could happen if elements like
glass walls or voids surrounded by balustrades were present. Space Syntax is a theoretical framework that allows to investigate relations between space and human. Two buildings of the University of Munster (Germany) were analysed with Space Syntax. Convex and axial maps and their properties were used. The aim of that kind of analysis was to investigate if Space Syntax methods can help us to analyse indoor navigation in case of visible, but not reachable spaces. Both buildings were split in two different spatial layouts, one considering visibility and one in regard to accessibility. Therefore, it was able to see if the visibility accessibility problem affects a building or not. This work leads to the conclusion that Space Syntax can be helpful for analysing indoor navigation if space is observable, but not accessible. This work concentrated on two dimensions. The next step would be to extend it to the third dimension.

GIS Software kann häufig sehr komplex sein. Dafür gibt es verschiedene Gründe wie zum Beispiel die Vielzahl der Funktionen, die ein solches System bereit stellt. Dem Benutzer Zugang zu diesen Funktionen zu ermöglichen stellt ein große Herausforderung im Hinblick auf das Design der Benutzerschnittstelle dar.  Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist, anhand existierender GIS Software wie ArcGIS oder PostGIS den aktuellen Stand bzgl. Funktionsumfang von GIS sowie dessen Realisierung auf der Benutzerschnittstellenebene zu erfassen und zu analysieren.

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.

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.

Ziel dieser Arbeit ist, am Beispiel von Hamburg mit einer Usability-Studie Probleme aufzudecken, die Nutzer auch mit bereits veröentlichten Anwendungen noch haben. Dabei werden die mobileWebseite und die Applikation untersucht und eventuelle Probleme in der Bedienung sowie markante Unterschiede zwischen beiden Anwendungen ermittelt, ohne dabei den Anspruch einer statistischen Auswertung zu haben.

Zunächst wird genauer auf die Thematiken der mobilen Fahrplananwendungen und dem Usability-Testing eingegangen und das Beispiel Hamburg kurz vorgestellt. Anschließend wird die Herangehensweise an einen Usability-Test geschildert und dessen Durchführung und Ergebnisse zusammengefasst. Abschließend wird ein kurzes Fazit aus den Ergebnissen des Tests gezogen. Das erste Kapitel erklärt die Usability und das Usability-Testing, führt in die Thematik mobiler Fahrplananwendungen bei Verkehrsbetrieben ein und stellt das hier untersuchte Beispiel des Hamburger Verkehrsverbundes vor. Im zweiten Kapitel werden die Erkenntnisse genutzt, um einen Usability-Tests zu entwickeln, durchzuführen und die Ergebnisse zu beschreiben. Abschließend gibt es noch eine Deutung dieser Ergebnisse.

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

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.

The goal of the work (jointly conducted with the ‘Institut für Epidemiologie und Sozialmedizin’ (IES) at the University of Münster) is to develop a spatial recommender system which assists in exploring cause-effect relationships of significant incidence elevations of selected cancer types in a predefined geographic region. The system should draw on Linked Data techniques to answer two types of queries:

• Q1: given a significant elevation of the cancer risk (parameterized through the standardized incidence ratio) for a certain tumour and at a certain spatial unit (e.g. community level), what are possible (spatial) cancer causes and cancer risk factors?
• Q2: given an elevated cancer cause/risk factor in a geographic region, what are types of cancer likely to occur?

The tasks of the student include both a modelling component and an implementation component. The modelling aspect involves:

• The specification of a use case (together with the IES);
• Identify useful taxonomies for cancer research as well as known causes and risk factors for selected cancer types in the monographies of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

The implementation aspect includes:

• The encoding of data from the use case using Linked Data techniques;
• The development of a Web Interface.

The successful candidate is expected to write the Master’s thesis in the Summer Semester 2014. S/he should have epidemiological background knowledge about cancer etiologies or willingness to learn about them. Programming knowledge (HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript) as well as knowledge of Semantic Web Technologies such as RDF, SPARQL is desirable but not mandatory.

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.

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.

Self-driving cars are a highly debated topic in the media, in research, and in industry. As it is much cheaper to test technologies for such cars in simulations before testing them in the real world, it is very important to create suitable environments for these simulations. The real world road network can change rapidly. These changes have to be reflected in the simulations, preferably in an automated way. This master thesis will try to answer the question to which extent it is possible to automate the updating of road networks for driving simulations and how this (partial or full) automation can be achieved.

Münster has the plan to reduce the maximum speed of traffic in several streets in town from 50 km/h to 30 km/h. It is claimed that this reduces emissions and is safer for the bikers. Car owners, on the other hand, are concerned about the effects of the maximum speed reductions on their travel times. Both sides of the debate lack quantitative support for their claims.

Geosimulation models can help to better understand and predict traffic from the local interactions and feedbacks between different road users, the spatial configuration of the city, and the spatio-temporal configuration of limited speed zones and traffic lights. The idea of this thesis is to construct an agent-based model of (part of) the Münster traffic system, and to calibrate this model with EnviroCar data (https://envirocar.org). Next, the model can be used to simulate the impacts of different future scenarios, such as the planned maximum speed reductions. The results of these scenarios are expected to support the abovementioned debate.

Models are simplified representations of real-world systems developed to better understand complex systems and to project their future system states under different scenarios. Ideally, after programming a model, its parameters are calibrated with respect to a set of observational data. Most calibration methods use a set of fixed parameters for the whole model runtime. This presumes stationarity of the processes in studied system, while this may not be the case in reality. Non-stationarity, also called systemic change, can cause large errors in the future projections modelled with fixed parameters. Therefore, it is important to at least assess if model parameters have been stable with respect to historic observations of the system. Developing a method for systemic change detection can best be done in a closed, fully understandable and controllable system, as this eases performance assessment of the method. Hereto, this thesis evaluates a method to detect systemic changes using an agent-based model and real observation data of a simple, closed system in which systemic changes are induced manually.

The Open City Toolkit has been suggested in [1,2] as a way of improving data re-use in the city context. This thesis will develop and test a module which suggests
relevant datasets for a new Open City Toolkit app. The development may follow user-centered design principles.

The thesis will involve two basic tasks
 - modelling of (spatial) datasets and apps in the context of the Open City Toolkit
 - specification of an annotation strategy of both apps and datasets, based on open data formats (e.g., RDF, JSON, JSON-LD)
 - design and implementation of recommendation functionalities (i.e., which datasets could be re-used in which apps)  
 
The feasibility of the ideas suggested is expected to be demonstrated through a prototypical implementation.


[1] Degbelo, A., Granell, C., Trilles, S., Bhattacharya, D., Casteleyn, S. and Kray, C. (2016) ‘Opening up smart cities: citizen-centric challenges and opportunities from GIScience’, ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 5(2), p. 16. doi: 10.3390/ijgi5020016.

[2] 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.

 

A dataset of railway tracks of good positional accuracy would be an important asset to railway companies and researchers. Railway track data is provided for free by some sources, namely the OpenRailwayMap, INSPIRE railway network and the Deutsche Bahn. However, the geometry of the track is not well-defined in several portions and they also lack positional accuracy and completeness. The Institute of Transportation Systems, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR) has developed a measurement vehicle called the ‘RailDriVE’ that has several sensors, including several high quality Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers, an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and a Laser Scanner.

The goal of the current work is to compare three different approaches to create a track of good quality from the measurements made by these sensors. The performance of these approaches in different environmental conditions (for example, open areas, forests) will also be assessed. In the first approach, the GNSS data points will be filtered based on their quality and then fused with IMU data using advanced sensor fusion algorithms. The center line of the track will be derived from the GNSS-IMU fused data. For the second approach, the point cloud obtained from the laser scanner data will be georeferenced using GNSS data and the center line of the track will be derived from the georeferenced point cloud. In the third approach, the GNSS-IMU fused points from the first approach will be used to georeference the laser scanner data and the center line will be derived from the georeferenced point cloud similar to the second approach. The accuracy of the result of each approach will be evaluated using aerial images provided by the GeoDataPortal of Sachsen as the reference data. Finally, the best result obtained would be submitted to OpenRailwayMap so that it is beneficial to the community.  

Parameterbasierte Identifikation von Realdaten-Streckenabschnitten im OpenDRIVE-Format