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

Ansprechpartner: Torsten Prinz / Jan Lehmann

Background

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

Methods

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

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

Contact

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

Metadata editing is a cumbersome task. Editors of standardized metadata documents (such as ISO 19xxx or OGC standards) need in depth knowledge of the available possibilities, and often enough the standards are designed in a flexible manner so that there is more than one way to model the same piece of information. In practice, metadata are often copy and pasted based on existing datasets, or simple templates are used. Naturally, errors and bad practices are also copied this way. Thefore a common practice is to create subsets of the generic data models and standards, so called "profiles", which are suitable to specific user domains.

This thesis will assist the editor of geospatial metadata in new and more intuitive ways and show alternatives to the template-based approach and using profiles, because these are yet another standard document that users have to read.

Instead the student will create a concept for assited editing for geospatial metadata based on existing metadata records as well as a prototpye for a highly interactive user interface based on an existing open source metadata editor. The new UI will integrate a editing form and existing records in different ways, such as

• displaying existing documents which are "related" or "similar" side by side so that users are always aware of them and can even take over parts of the information, or
• a powerful and fast "autocomplete" functionality for every form field based on existing records (potentially using a document index database).

Based on the prototype, the new visualisation and interaction patterns are evaluated and requirements are derived for metadata manegement systems to answer the question: How can editors of complex geospatial metadata be supported based on existing metadata documents?

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

Deutsch:

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

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

English:

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

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

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

In diesem Bereich bieten sich viele verschiedene Themen an:

• Wie kann man aus statischen Abbildungen in wissenschaftlichen Publikationen dynamische, interaktive Abbildungen generieren?
• Wie lassen sich originale Abbildungen mit reproduzierten oder möglicherweise veränderten Abbildungen vergleichen (Slider, Peephole, Überlagerung). Hier bietet sich eine Mischung aus Implementierung und Evaluation (z.B. Nutzerstudie) an.
• Falls ihr an Studien interessiert seid, könnt ihr euch bei uns austoben. Unsere Plattform bietet viele Möglichkeiten mit je nach Bedarf mehr oder weniger Implementierungsarbeit. Möglich sind sowohl quantitative als auch qualitative Studien. Zielgruppen sind in der Regel Forscher und Studenten. 

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

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

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

Communication overall is not limited to verbal exchanges; other modalities also play an essential role. In particular, facial expressions and gestures are often crucial to understanding our communication partner – be it a human or a computer. In face-to-face communication, we frequently use deictic gestures such as pointing to express or describe the location or shape of an object to support the spoken language. For example, a person might utter "Please pass me that" to someone else while pointing to a cup of tea on the table. Without adequately perceiving the pointing gesture, it will be difficult for the other person to correctly identify what the speaker means. Spatial pointing permeates everyday life, and it is instrumental to successfully exchanging information. However, communicating gestures, pointing, in particular, are challenging when two parties communicate across distances.

Electric muscle stimulation (EMS) is a state-of-the-art technology emerging in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. EMS use low signal to voluntary move the limbs of an user. With EMS designers can provide haptic feedback to users ranging from a subtle tactile feeling on their fingers when touching an object in Virtual Reality to a sudden movement of their muscles to design movement [1].  

In this thesis, the student will investigate and evaluate the potential of EMS as a mean for communicating spatial gestures to a remote recipient.

A Bachelor’s thesis student would develop an app that, in a communication scenario, would be capable of detecting the pointing pose of the sender and then designing and applying an EMS response to a remote receiver.

A Master's thesis student, in addition, will have to perform an user study in order to evaluate and compare this communication technique with a traditional face-to-face scenario.

In both cases, the student should have a strong background in programming and computer science. Prior knowledge of techniques as machine learning, computer vision, Android, and Arduino is recommended.

[1] Oliver Beren Kaul, Max Pfeiffer, and Michael Rohs. 2016. Follow the Force: Steering the Index Finger towards Targets using EMS. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2526-2532. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2851581.2892352

Positioning systems are used to obtain positioning information such as location, orientation, speed, etc of a person. Thus, they provide an essential service for Location Based Systems (LBS). Over the years, different types of positioning systems have been built, with different capabilities. We analyzed these existing positioning systems and created a design space as a systematic approach for representing positioning systems in general.

This thesis will develop and evaluate an application to represent this design space. This application will,

• Let users to input information about the positioning systems they develop (Technology, Measurements used, Accuracy, etc.)
• Let users to input metadata about the positioning systems they develop (year, authors, paper title, link to source code, etc.)
• Generate summaries/ valuable information from existing data (eg. what are the positioning systems with accuracy > 1m?, percentage of systems that use WiFi, etc.)
• Visualize the design space
• etc.

Bioenergy is renewable energy derived from biological sources, such as crops. One type of bioenergy is ethanol made from sugar cane, used as a biofuel for cars. Although ethanol is renewable for sure, there have been concerns whether it is also sustainable, because of the potential impacts of the sugar cane plantations, for example on deforestation, socio-economic conditions of the workers and water use.

One way to assess the latter impact is the water footprint. The water footprint is an indicator of freshwater use for making a certain product or delivering a service (Hoekstra et al. 2011). The vast expansion of sugar cane in Brazil in the last decades, mainly for ethanol production, was an incentive for Rodriguez et al. (2016) to assess the water footprint of the suitable expansion areas in Brazil. Yet, the fact that an area is suitable for sugar cane expansion does not mean that expansion will take place, because expansion is also driven by market demand.

The aim of this BSc thesis is to use a set of existing sugar cane expansion scenarios for 2030 from a demand-driven land use change model (Verstegen et al., 2016, van der Hilst et al., in review) to re-assess the future water footprint of sugar cane for ethanol in Brazil. This will be done using the methodology from Rodriguez et al. (2016) and the high-resolution maps of water-related variables developed by Xavier et al. (2016).

References:

Van der Hilst, F., Verstegen, J.A., Woltjer, G., Smeets, E., Faaij, A.P.C. (in review). Mapping direct and indirect land use changes resulting from biofuel production and the effect of LUC mitigation measures. In review at Global Change Biology Bioenergy.

Hoekstra, A. Y., Chapagain, A. K., Aldaya, M. M. & Mekonnen, M. M. (2011). Water Footprint Assessment Manual: Setting the Global Standard. http://waterfootprint.org/en/resources/publications/water-footprint-assessment-manual-global-standard/

Rodriguez, R., Scanlon, B.R. and King, C.W. (2016). Sugarcane water footprint in the suitable areas for crop in Brazil. CLIMA Policy Brief #1, Centro Clima/COPPE/UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, 6 p. http://testsite1.hospedagemdesites.ws/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/CLIMA-PolBrief-1-Water-footprint-cane.pdf

Verstegen, J.A., van der Hilst, F., Woltjer, G., Karssenberg, D., de Jong, S.M., Faaij, A.P.C. (2016). What can and can't we say about indirect land-use change in Brazil using an integrated economic – land-use change model? Global Change Biology Bioenergy 8(3), 561-578.

Xavier, A. C., King, C. W. & Scanlon, B. R. (2015) Daily gridded meteorological variables in Brazil (1980–2013). Int. J. Climatol. 36, p. 2644-2659. doi:10.1002/joc.4518

Die senseBox:edu ist ein auf Arduino basierender Citizen Science Bausatz zum Bau und zur Programmierung von Umweltmessstationen im MINT-Unterricht. Mit  www.sensebox.de/blockly wurde ein webbasierter Prototyp für eine visuelle Prorgammierumgebung für die senseBox entwickelt, der auf Ardublockly basiert.

Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es vorhandene Systeme zur visuellen und OTA-Programmierung zu evaluieren und den bisherigen Prototypen in eine native App für Tablets umzusetzen und einen neuen Workflow der drahtlosen Übertragung (über WiFi) von Programmcode zur senseBox zu implementieren und zu evaluieren.

Various sensors are available to determine where a person is located (GPS, GSM, WiFi, Beacons etc.) but in practice it is rarely the case that information about the user's location is perfectly precise, accurate and recent.  Various interfere with location sensing, for example, reflections might cause problems for GPS and the presence of many people might cause issues for WiFi-based positioning.  When the location (and orientation) of a person is subject to these problems, then it becomes difficult for a system to provide good navigation support, i.e. to give directions that a user can easily follow

The goal of this MSc thesis is thus to design and evaluate different visualisation strategies for giving directions depending on the quality of the location information available.  Based on an existing classification of typical problems and errors, this thesis will identify existing means to visualise directions, analyse their dependency on the quality of location information and develop new visualisation strategies.  In order to evaluate these strategies, they need to be tested with actual users.

Thema: Im Rahmen von aktuellen IFGIcopter-Aktivitäten bietet das Spannungsfeld Drohnen/UAV und Geodatenfusion' interessante Schnittstellen hinsichtlich geoinformatischer Datenanalyse und Werkzeugentwicklung. Fernerkundungsdaten unterschiedlichster UAV-Sensoren können z.B. unterschiedlichste zeitabhängige Momentaufnahmen von 'Geo-Objektverlagerungen' erfassen und mittels Fusion mit Sekundärdaten zu Modellen einer dynamischen Entwicklung führen. 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 / Florian Hillen

Researchers face an increasing need to share the input data, data created, and analysis steps along with published papers, in order to allow readers to reproduce their analysis. This MSc thesis will explain to journals how they can enable this, with focus on the R environment (http://www.r-project.org/).

Reproducibility is an important aspect of geoscientific research, because the credibility of science is at stake when research is not reproducible.  A mature and growing community relies on the R software environment for carrying out geoscientific research, and numerous R extension packages have been published for geoscientific analysis. Geoscientific data often have complex structures (variety in reference systems for space and time, high dimensionality, complex phenomena need be represented by appropriate data structures), and concensus on data file formats is lacking. R Data files can represent data of arbitrary complexity in a direct-to-use form.  To reproduce the work presented in scientific publications, the open source  R environment only requires R Data files and R analysis scripts. The One-Click-Reproduce button makes reproducing research simple.

Zunehmend spielen bei der Suche nach Informationen Raum und Zeit eine wichtige Rolle.  Aktuelle Nutzerschnittstellen unterstützen dies jedoch oft nur per Schlüsselwort anfrage ("Finde ein Restaurant in meiner Nähe", "Finde ein Hotel in Paris"). Es sind jedoch deutlich mächtigere Schnittstellen denkbar, wo räumliche und zeitliche Kriterien intuitiver und feingranularer spezifiziert werden können. Zum Beispiel könnte der Suchbereich auf einer Karte markiert werden oder mittels einer Zeitleiste festgelegt werden, aus welchem Zeitintervall Ergebnisse gewünscht sind.

Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, Anforderungen an solche Nutzerschnittstellen zu ermitteln, Ideen zur Realisierung zu erarbeiten und mittels einer prototypischen Implementierung die Eigenschaften der entwickelten Ideen zu evaluieren.

Ein Beispiel für eine solche Nutzerschnittstelle findet sich hier.

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

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

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

Die Arbeit kann auf Deutsch oder Englisch verfasst werden.

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

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

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

Requirements:

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

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

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

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

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

This thesis will be supervised by Judith Verstegen and Benjamin Risse (Computer Science Department, Münster).

Runners often use technology to accompany their activities with tracking, navigation, communication or entertainment. They use MP3 players, watches, and smartphones, which require interaction for using an application or changing the current music track. However, using a device can become a challenge for the runner because manually controlling it and running interfere.  Such momentary interferences include the physical movement of the running activity and requesting and receiving services. Even if interacting is possible, the movement required for the interaction will disturb the running. To address this, understanding how to design interaction with minimizing interferences is the overall theme of this project.

Various options for theses contributing to this theme exist.

• A radically new idea aims to using the runners' GPS-data to trigger actions (e.g. in a game). To explore this idea, a thesis can develop and evaluate a geo-based game that uses defined route segments (cf. Strava Segments) or shapes (cf. GPS art) as triggers. For example, running an extra circle near the Aasee in Münster may trigger 'fight a Pokemon' in the game.
   
• One approach can develop and evaluate applications for the use while being in motion. A navigation App may provide Instructions for Running in the Unknown; a Context-Note App may be able to sense, store, and represent context cues to help to remember thoughts one had during running.
   
• Another approach can define and evaluate interaction techniques for the use while being in motion. For example, Novel Interaction Techniques for the Runner's devices can be defined by users. This approach allows for identifying appropriate behaviors that interaction techniques can instrumentalize.
   
• Finally, movement based interaction techniques are natural to runners as they are in movement already. A  thesis can aim to implement and test new input techniques. Examples may be Body Area-Based Touch Input, or Gesture Control for the Runner's devices.

To contribute to this project, you will propose your own idea and optionally refer to one of the examples above. Your thesis should also contribute to a follow-up publication.

1st Supervisor: Matthias Seuter
2nd Supervisor: t.b.a.

For traditional maps, the concept of layers enables many feature for the users of GIS, WebGIS and other map-based systems. For example, it allows for selectively visualising certain aspects, for managing different versions of the same geo-data and for comparing different scenarios. Terrestrial pictorial information (e.g. panoramic or 360 degree photographs or videos) is an alternative way to maps that facilitates depicting the world that is arguably more accessible to lay people.  For videos or photographs of spatial features there is however no well-defined concept of layers that would facilitate all the features that map layers support. This aim of this thesis project is thus to explore, develop and evaluate this concept (GeoCollages).  Different approaches and questions can be tackled in this area, including:

• data models and basic operations for such GeoCollages
• interfaces for the creation of GeoCollages
• interactive and interaction mechanisms for exploring GeoCollages (single-user, multi-user)
• developing and evaluating a prototypical application for urban planning based on GeoCollages

Basic infrastructure for displaying, storing and managing videos, photos and overlays already exists so that work would not have to start from scratch.  This topic also provides the opportunity for multiple people to work on complementary yet separate subtopics simultaneously.

This thesis will,

1. identify the parameters (available from a smartphone's OS) that could be used to represent the quality of location information (such as the error, signal strength,.. some work is already available)

2. use those parameters to attribute different aspects of location quality (eg. what parameters could be used to represent accuracy? what parameters used represent coverage, etc. - some part of this work has already being done)

3. Present the level of quality to an LBS (you can use an LBS of your choice, even a third party application)

4. change the UI/ functionality of the LBS  depending on the quality (for example, in the case of a navigation application, if the accuracy is very low, animate/ highlight nearby landmarks so that they are clearly visible to the user)

The global population grows with about 1.1% each year. Yet, this growth is not distributed uniformly over space. The spatial distribution of the future population determines the impact of natural hazards on the population (e.g. volcanic eruptions, floods, droughts) as well as the impact of the population on the natural system (e.g. erosion, industrial hazards, forest fires). To quantify and minimize future risks, it is important to have spatially-explicit projections of the future world population.

In the GI forum (July 18^th 2017) and in a conference paper (http://carsten.io/agile-2017-short-Kessler-Marcotullio.pdf), Carsten Kessler, Associate Professor at the Aalborg University Copenhagen, has presented a geosimulation model to simulate the spatio-temporal patterns of population growth. The model is implement in Python, using the NumPy library on a 1x1 km raster. The rules of the model are relatively simplistic. The main reason for this is that more complex rules would increase the (already long) computation time too much. So, before the model can be improved, computation times need to be reduced.

The aim of this thesis is to assess how much computation time can be reduced by:

1. Implementing the model in PCRaster Python instead of NumPy;
2. Parallel processing; and/or
3. Using different cell sizes (it should also be assessed how this affects the model outputs).

Input data and the current model are provided to you. This thesis is supervised by Judith Verstegen and Carsten Kessler. There is an opportunity for a research stay at Aalborg University Copenhagen during the work on this thesis.

Visiting a museum is a leisure activity which is approached in different ways by different people. Some visitors try to know as much as possible by studying all individual artifacts, others are more selective and spend time on artefacts that embody certain characteristics while neglecting the others, and some attempt to get a general idea of the exhibition by strolling through the museum (Dean, 1994).

Veron and Levasseur (1983) suggest that visitors’ movements are comparable to the behavior of four types of animals: ants, fish, butterflies and grasshoppers. They propose a classification of museum visitors based on these animals. For example, the ant-visitor follows a distinct path and spends much time observing all artifacts closely, but avoids empty spaces, while the fish-visitor prefers to move and stop at empty spaces in the center of the exhibition room, but does not come close to individual artifacts and thus does not observe details. In the decades after this initial idea, others (e.g. Dim & Kuflik, 2015; Zancanaro et al., 2007) have extended the classifications to, for example, pairs of visitors, and have developed methods to derive the visitor type from trajectory data. However, the visitor-type behaviors have never been formalized into a model.

The aim of this thesis is to build an agent-based model (ABM) of the distinct visitor types in a museum. Such a model can help us to better understand how museum visitors respond differently to different exhibition layouts and how density patterns in the museum emerge from this. A scenario approach can be used to test, e.g. if certain layouts may generate a better spread of visitors throughout the museum.

This thesis is supervised by Judith Verstegen and Sergey Mukhametov. A ground plan of a museum in Münster and visitor trajectories for this museum are available to you, for potential use as model input, calibration and validation data.

References

Dean (1994). Museum Exhibition: Theory and Practice. London, Routledge.

Dim & Kuflik (2015). Automatic Detection of Social Behavior of Museum Visitor Pairs. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems 4(4), 17, doi:10.1145/2662869.

Veron and Levasseur (1983). Ethnographie de l’exposition, Paris, Bibliothèque Publique d’Information, Centre Georges Pompidou.

Zancanaro, Kuflik, Boger, Goren-Bar & Goldwasser (2007). Analyzing Museum Visitors’ Behavior Patterns. User Modeling 2007: 11th International Conference, UM 2007, Corfu, Greece, July 25-29.

Grain farmers around a newly developed wind farm on a ridge in Australia observed a significant increase in frost damage since the establishment of a wind farm. The hypothesis from climatologists is that under certain synoptic weather conditions, the wind farm can impact local wind patterns that may lead to anomalous micro-climates around the farmlands in the vicinity of the existing wind farm. The aim of this project is to support the farmers by a data driven approach to study changes in surface temperature patterns before and after the development of the wind farm and answer the question if increasing frost occurrence can be attributed to the new wind farm. In this context, this thesis would approach the problem from a satellite perspective. Lacking a sufficient number of climate stations, time series of multi-sensor remote sensing data (e.g. MODIS, Landsat) will be processed and analyzed this project.

The thesis will be conducted in collaboration with the Center for Atmospheric Research in Christchurch, New Zealand. We are looking for a motivated candidate, ideally with previous experience in remote sensing analyses. For more information, please contact Hanna Meyer (hanna.meyer@geo.uni-marburg.de) (IfGI)

Machine learning algorithms are frequently applied in environmental science to derive spatially comprehensive information from limited field data using remote sensing based predictor variables. However, recent studies indicate that the application of machine learning algorithms to spatial data is challenging due to spatial dependencies in the data. One issue of spatial dependencies is that certain predictor variables cannot be interpreted by the algorithms in a meaningful way and lead to wrong spatial predictions. This is especially a problem for temporally static predictor variables such as elevation or land cover. The current solution is to remove such variables from the models. However, often such variables still play a role for the target variable (e.g. elevation as driver for air temperature).

The aim of this project is to find solutions of how such static variables that lead to overfitting and misleading models can still be included in machine learning applications. We want to test if this can be achieved by dividing time series into their components (trend, seasonality, noise, ...) and train machine learning models separately for each component using different types of predictor variables.

For more information on the background see 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. For more information, please contact Hanna Meyer (hanna.meyer@geo.uni-marburg.de) (IfGI)

Although agricultural land expansion is taking place in many parts of the world, some regions are experiencing the reverse trend: cropland abandonment. This potentially leads to a restoration of the native vegetation, often resulting in an increase in biodiversity and in net carbon storage. This has been happening for example in Western Siberia (Wertebach et al., 2017) and Northern Kazakhstan (Dara et al., 2018) since the breakdown of the Soviet Union. A remaining question is to what extent cropland abandonment will continue into the future and which locations will be abandoned. This is important to know if one wants to estimate the impacts on biodiversity and carbon storage, as these depend on the abandonment location characteristics (e.g. soil type, moisture regime).

Land use change models are designed to answer such questions about the amount and location of land use changes. The aim of this thesis is to apply the PCRaster Land Use Change model (PLUC) (e.g. Verstegen et al., 2012) to one of the two above-mentioned regions to simulate 1) historic cropland abandonment to quantify the calibrate and validate the model, and 2) multiple scenarios of future cropland abandonment to analyze how the land use system might develop. The latter results can be used to quantify the potential amount of carbon storage.

This thesis is supervised by Judith Verstegen and Norbert Hölzel (or someone else from his group). The time series of land use maps for the chosen region will be made available to you, to serve as model input, calibration and validation data. Challenges in this thesis topic are conceptual (defining driving factors of abandonment, outlining scenarios, etc.) as well as technical (implementing the driving factors into PLUC, employing a calibration algorithm, etc.). Knowledge of PCRaster Python is strongly recommended.

References

Dara, Baumann, Kuemmerle, Pflugmacher, Rabe, Griffiths, Hölzel, Kamp, Freitag and Hostert (2018). Mapping the timing of cropland abandonment and recultivation in northern Kazakhstan using annual Landsat time series. Remote Sensing of Environment 213, p. 49-60, doi: 10.1016/j.rse.2018.05.005.

Verstegen, Karssenberg, van der Hilst and Faaij (2012). Spatio-temporal uncertainty in Spatial Decision Support Systems: A case study of changing land availability for bioenergy crops in Mozambique. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 36, p. 30-42, doi: 10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2011.08.003

Wertebach, Hölzel, Kämpf, Yurtaev, Tupitsin, Kiehl, Kamp and Kleinebecker (2017). Soil carbon sequestration due to post-Soviet cropland abandonment: estimates from a large-scale soil organic carbon field inventory. Global Change Biology 23, p. 3729-3741, doi: 10.1111/gcb.13650.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Possible bachelor and master thesis could address:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Im Arbeitsfeld der reproduzierbaren Forschung werden wissenschaftliche Artikel gemeinsam mit Daten und Programmcode in Form von Kompendien organisiert. Ziel solcher Kompendien ist es, die Daten oder die Analysen austauschbar zu gestalten, sowie den Zugang zu Daten und Software langfristig zu sicherzustellen. Für ein gutes Benutzererlebnis sollte der Austausch von Daten und Analysen zwischen Kompendien einfach und stabil sein, die einen Daten also kompatibel mit dem anderen Code.

Suchdatenbanken, wie zum Beispiel Elasticsearch, spielen beim Auffinden von Dokumenten im Web eine zentrale Rolle. Eine typische Funktion einer Suche ist das Vorschlagen ähnlicher Dokumente auf Basis hochperformanter invertierter Indizes.

Einen ersten Schritt hin zur Kompabilitätanalyse stellen direkte und mittelbare Metadaten dar die in Suchdatenbanken gesammelt werden. Diese Metadaten werden heute meist vom Autor erstellt (abstract, keywords) und nicht umfassend. Auf der Basis von Kompendien können diese und weitere Informationen aus den Sekundärdateien (Daten, Quellcode) abgeleitet werden. Zum Beispiel könnten ähnliche genutzte Softwarekomponenten oder Datenausschnitte einen Hinweis darauf geben, dass zwei gegebene Kompendien so weit kompatibel sind, dass die Daten des einen mit der Analyse des anderen kombiniert werden können.

Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, die möglichen Quellen von Metadaten wissenschaftlicher Publikationen zu sichten und mit den Anforderungen des Anwendungsfalls zusammen zu führen. Es sollen neue Wege zur Erweiterung, Integration und Vergleich der Metadatensätze entworfen und mittels einer prototypischen Implementierung evaluiert werden.

Die Arbeit kann auf Deutsch oder Englisch verfasst werden.

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

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.

 

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

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

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

Contact

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact:

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

Werner Kuhn (kuhn@uni-muenster.de)

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

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

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

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

Requirement: experience with R and R programming.

Resulting package:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Der Crowdsourcing-Ansatz hat in der jüngsten Vergangenheit stark an Bedeutung gewonnen und wird immer häufiger zur Informationsbeschaffung angewendet. Die vorliegende Bachelorarbeit vergleicht automatische sowie manuelle Eingabemethoden bei mobilem Crowdsourcing. Primär soll herausgefunden werden, welche Methode von den Nutzern bevorzugt verwendet wird und welche Gründe diese Präaferenzen haben können. Weiterhin wird der Einfluss einer Erinnerungsfunktion für Eingaben per Hand untersucht.

Um diese Fragestellungen zu beantworten wurde eine Kombination aus zwei Fragebögen und einer Nutzerstudie angewendet. Für die Nutzerstudie wurde eine Android-App zur Lärmmessung implementiert und über zwei Wochen von einer Gruppe von 16 Personen getestet.

Die Ergebnisse der Studie zeigen, dass eine automatisierte Eingabemethode der manuellen tendenziell vorgezogen wird. Weiterhin wurde festgestellt, dass die Nutzung einer Erinnerungsfunktion die Anzahl der Eingaben auf Kosten eines erhöhten Störfaktors mit sich bringen kann.

Diese Arbeit gab eine kurze Einführung über UAV und ihre Anwendungsmöglichkeiten. Besonderes Augenmerk wurde dabei auf den Bereich vertikaler Aufnahmen, speziell im colorinfraroten Bereich, gelegt. Mithilfe eines entwickelten Webtools wurde gezeigt, wie die Zeitkomponente der aufgenommenen Videos mit der aktuellen Flughöhe der Drohne verknüpft werden kann. Dadurch wird ein erster Schritt zur vertikalen Darstellung von Farbinfrarotfilmen durch Erstellung eines Höhenprofils dargelegt. 

Die vorliegende Arbeit zeigt Optimierungsmöglichkeiten für ein webbasiertes Geodatenmanagement hinsichtlich Interoperabilität und Zusammenarbeit im Rahmen studentischer Projektarbeiten auf und setzt einige dieser Möglichkeiten am praktischen Beispiel der Applikation StudMap14 um. StudMap14 ist ein mit Web-Technologien wie JavaScript, PHP, Sencha Ext JS [1] und GeoExt [2] implementiertes Webportal, das ein Teil der Geodateninfrastruktur des Fachbereichs 14 Geowissenschaften der Universität Münster ist [3]. Zudem wird ein GeoServer [4] zur Bereitstellung von Layern des OGC-Standards Web Map Service (WMS) [5] und die Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) [6] zur Geodatenverarbeitung verwendet. Es geht in dieser Arbeit nicht um die Neuentwicklung eines Systems, sondern um die Verbesserung und Erweiterung einer bestehenden und sich bereits in Verwendung befindlichen Software.

In Kapitel 2 (Anforderungsanalyse) wird zunächst analysiert, welche Anforderungen beziehungsweise Optimierungsmöglichkeiten bestehen und daraufhin festgelegt, welche von diesen umzusetzen sind. Kapitel 3 (Implementierung) beschreibt zuerst die verwendeten Technologien und geht anschließend auf technische Details der Implementierung der neuen Funktionen ein. Die Funktionsfähigkeit und die Benutzerfreundlichkeit dieser Funktionen wird im Rahmen einer Nutzerstudie in Kapitel 4 evaluiert. Eine Zusammenfassung dieser Arbeit und einen Ausblick auf mögliche zukünftige Erweiterungen bietet Kapitel 5. Dieses Einleitungskapitel stellt im Weiteren die Applikation StudMap14 vor und legt die genauere Motivation zur Erweiterung dieses Systems dar.

This bachelor thesis deals with an approach for the estimation of population in small areas. The approach was developed by Klaus Steinnocher (Steinnocher et al., 2006, Steinnocher et al., 2011) and relies on the assumption that the population density is proportional to the degree of soil sealing. Population data on the community level is disaggregated to a level of electoral districts for the whole region of Münster. The "EEA Fast Track Service Precursor on Land Monitoring" dataset represents the degree of soil sealing in 20x20m grid cells and is used as data basis for this approach. The CORINE Land Cover (CLC) dataset is used to mask those areas from the EEA dataset that are not used for residential purposes. For the same reason an OpenStreetMap dataset is used to mask the streets from the EEA dataset. The approach from Steinnocher is applied to the remaining areas which represent the living space as good as possible. The calculated population data is compared to the reference population data on a level of electoral districts. Differences and tendencies are discussed. Furthermore the realized approach from Steinnocher (Steinnocher et al., 2006, Steinnocher et al., 2011) is compared to another approach developed by Francisco Javier Gallego (Gallego et al., 2001, Gallego et al., 2010). Differences and characteristics of the two approaches are discussed.

Fotoalben im Internet stellen eine beliebte Anwendung des Web 2.0 dar, bei der eine Vielzahl digitaler Fotos veröffentlicht wird. Zusätzlich zu den Bildern werden Metadaten wie Schlagwörter oder Freitextbeschreibungen gespeichert. Diese ermöglichen, Fotos zu kategorisieren und für textbasierte Suchmaschinen zu indizieren. Aus den Metadaten können ebenfalls Einträge für geographische Namenslexika gewonnen werden. In diesem Fall spricht man auch von sogenannten Bottom-Up Gazetteers (vgl. Keßler et al. 2009b). Zum Beispiel können die räumlichen Koordinaten aller Fotos mit der Bezeichnung „Münster“ zu einer Punktwolke zusammengefasst werden. Anschließend lassen sich daraus Aussagen über die geometrische Form und die geographi-sche Lage des Ortes ableiten.

Die vorliegende Arbeit betrachtet die zeitliche Dimension von Fotos. Es wird dabei untersucht, ob sich mithilfe der Aufnahmedaten die Dauer von Ereignissen ermitteln lässt. Hierbei werden Veranstaltungen (engl. Events) als eine bestimmte Ausprägung eines Ereignisses fokussiert. Deren Analyse erfolgt mit einem Clustering-Algorithmus, einer gängigen Klassifikationsmethode in der Geoinformatik. Das Verfahren wird anhand fünf ausgewählter Beispiele für Events und vergleichend mit drei Beispielen für Orte getestet.

Zur Visualisierung des Datenmaterials wurde eine graphische Benutzerschnittstelle in Form einer interaktiven Karte implementiert. Diese kann nun mit existierenden Gazetteers verbunden werden. Die Anwendung wurde speziell für Smartphones entwickelt, die sich in den letzten Jahren zunehmender Popularität erfreuen. Aufbauend auf den Ergebnissen der Analyse und der Implementierung werden mögliche Einsatzgebiete und Erweiterungen in Aussicht gestellt.

In dem ersten Kapitel werden zunächst alle für die weiteren Abschnitte notwendigen Grundlagen eingeführt.

Umgebungslärm ist eine der umfassendsten Umweltbelastungen, da der Mensch ihr über seinem gesamten Tagesablauf hinweg ungeschützt ausgesetzt ist. Der Einfluss geht dabei über eine einfache Belästigung des Menschen hinaus und umfasst beispielsweise das Auslö-sen von Schlafstörungen, die Förderung kognitiver Beeinträchtigung sowie die Hervorbrin-gung von Herz-Kreislauf-Erkrankungen, weshalb Lärm inzwischen auch als entscheidende Krankheitsbelastung gewertet wird (vgl. World Health Organization 2011).

Mit dem Aufkommen des nutzerzentrierten „Web 2.0“ und mobiler Computer, sowie der Zukunft des ubiquitären Computings stehen gleichsam immer mehr Möglichkeiten zur Ver-fügung, diesen Umwelteinfluss direkt an seinem Immissionsort durch den Menschen einzu-schätzen und diese Daten anderen Nutzern zur Verfügung zu stellen.

Providing cognitively effective wayfinding instructions is an ongoing research objective. In addition to providing instructions that are efficient to reach a target location, research has also addressed developing instructions in a verbal format that could potentially facilitate spatial orientation and cognitive mapping. In this study, a type of verbal instructions is used that consists of not only essential information for a person to change the direction at decision points, but also additional orientation information along a route that is considered crucial for maintaining spatial orientation and getting an internal representation of the spatial layout. This type of verbal route descriptions is compared with machine-generated as well as skeletal descriptions for the same route. Thirty participants were randomly assigned to familiarize with one of three different types of wayfinding instructions, which described a specific route participants were unfamiliar with. Thus, they were intended to mentally walk along this route. The different types of instructions include: 1) machine-generated instructions, 2) orientationbased instructions, and 3) skeletal instructions. Results indicate that participants using the orientation instructions made least errors in their performance of spatial orientation. Results concerning their drawn sketch maps, however, revealed least accurate results in both landmark placement and route segment analysis among the three types of instructions. Regarding their good performance in orientation estimation, sketch map accuracy is suggested to be secondary concerning performance in spatial orientation and cognitive mapping. Additionally, using the orientation-based instructions type is not found beneficial regarding distance estimation accuracy. The machine-generated instructions with included distance information, however, are not found to lead to a good estimation of distance along the route. This study supports the validity of designing wayfinding instructions in the suggested way. It further implies the necessity to conduct a more comprehensive study on the effects of different types of instructions on various aspects of wayfinding behavior.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Retrieval of data from the Starthilfe website.

• Creation of spatial datasets based on the retrieved data.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.