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

Informationen über das GeoGame OriGami: https://origami.ifgi.de/

Wir haben in OriGami ein Kartenlese-Spiel erstellt, mit dem wir dazu in der Lage sind, die Kompetenzen im Orientieren/ Navigieren mit Karte bei (Grundschul-) Kindern zu messen. Dieses Spiel haben wir an zwei verschiedenen Orten mit Grundschulkindern getestet und als Testinstrument validiert. Unsere Idee ist es nun, eine vergleichbare virtuelle Welt auf der Grundlage von Unity und ArcGIS CityEngine aufzubauen. Kinder sollen dann OriGami innerhalb der virtuellen Welt spielen und ihre Kartenlesekompetenzen unter Beweis stellen. Ziel ist es, ihr Abschneiden in der virtuellen Welt dem Abschneiden in der echten Welt gegenüberzustellen.

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.

Das ZDM/IVV sucht ab sofort in Zusammenarbeit mit dem IFGI eine/n BSc-Kandidaten/in aus der Geoinformatikzwecks innovativen "Re-Designs" des Geodatenportals StudMap14 (http://gdione4all.uni-muenster.de/joomla/index.php/studmap14) 

Kenntnisse/Einarbeitung in die GeoServer-Umgebung und Interesse an modernen GDI-Lösungen sind Voraussetzungen für dieses BSc-Projekt (ggf. ist eine Finanzierung mit 5 SHK-Stunden für 6 Monate möglich).

Bei Interesse direkt mit Dr. Torsten Prinz in Kontakt treten!

Die openSenseMap bietet live Daten zu verschiedensten Umweltphänomenen, Jedoch ist es zur Zeit schwierig diese Daten erkunden. Ziel dieser Bachelor Arbeit wäre es neue Möglichkeiten zu schaffen, die Daten interaktiv darzustellen. Interessant wären zum Beispiel live Interpolationen über Feinstaubwerte oder die Temperaturentwicklung in Innenstädten im Hochsommer. Um diese Daten einem möglichst grossem Publikum zur Verfügung zu stellen, soll in dieser Bachelorarbeit untersucht werden, welche Möglichkeiten hier neuste Webtechnologien bieten. Verschiedene Visualisierungen sollen generiert werden und mit einer Nutzerstudie evaluiert werden.  

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

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

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

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

Kontakt

Dr. Morin Ostkamp

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

+49 251 59689 325

m.ostkamp@conterra.de

Martin Wilden

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

+49 251 59689 336

m.wilden@conterra.de

Literatur

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Proc. AIP ‘16, AIP Publishing, 2016

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

mobile Endgeräten. Bochum University of Applied Sciences, 2017

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

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

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

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

Taylor & Francis, 1996

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relevant literature

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

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

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

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

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

Navigation research is usually performed in very specific spatial context (such as the city in which the paper's authors are based or the virtual environment that they have created). This introduces a challenge to generalizability and replicability of navigation research because we do not know whether classic research findings would be equally applicable in different spatial contexts (e.g., a different city).

This thesis focuses on replicating an existing wayfinding paper (to be chosen by the student) in Münster, or in a virtual environment available at ifgi.

The key challenge is finding a way to make the new spatial context (of Münster) comparable to that of the original paper.

Thesis co-supervised by Daniel Nüst (with technical support w.r.t. replicability).

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).

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kontakt

Dr. Morin Ostkamp

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

+49 251 59689 325

m.ostkamp@conterra.de

Martin Wilden

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

+49 251 59689 336

m.wilden@conterra.de

Literatur

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Proc. AIP ‘16, AIP Publishing, 2016

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

mobile Endgeräten. Bochum University of Applied Sciences, 2017

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

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

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

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

Taylor & Francis, 1996

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relevant literature

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

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?

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

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

Schematic maps are maps that intentionally distort and misrepresent geometries in order to simplify maps. Oftentimes, schematic maps give a better overview of the environment, because they focus only on important aspects. The displays of mobile devices offer only limited space. This thesis topic aims at the development of an algorithm to schematize maps automatically for mobile devices.

Schematization refers to misrepresentations of shape and size of spatial objects and distortions of distance and direction relations among them. The research starts from findings by Latecki and Lakämper, who developed the discrete curve evolution, an algorithm to schematize topographic maps. Barkowski et al. applied this algorithm to map schematization.

References:

Latecki, L.J. and R. Lakämper (2000). Shape similarity measure based on correspondence of visual parts. IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) 22(10): 1185-1190.

Barkowsky, T., L.J. Latecki, and K.-F. Richter (2000). Schematizing maps: Simplification of geographic shape by discrete curve evolution. Spatial cognition II: Integrating abstract theories, empirical studies, formal methods and practical applications. C. Freksa, et al., Springer: 41–53.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact

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

The purpose of this work is to introduce the concept of the Pattern-Oriented Modelling strategy into the calibration an urban growth based on the cellular automaton modelling paradigm. The approach will be tested on the three selected European cities, representing different types of urban sprawl.