Theses

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.

Author: Holger Fritze

Supervisor: Edzer Pebesma

Co-supervisor: Iris Stewart-Frey

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)

Author: -

Supervisor: -

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.

Author: Johanna Möllmann

Supervisor: Christian Kray

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.

Author: Niklas Trzaska

Supervisor: Christian Kray

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.

Author: Axel Virnich

Supervisor: Simon Jirka

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

Author: Jens Balmert

Supervisor: Rui Li

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?

Author: MO

Supervisor: Morin Ostkamp

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.

Author: Nico Steffens

Supervisor: C. Kray

Co-supervisor: M. Pfeiffer

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.

Author: Bartosz Mazurkiewicz

Supervisor: Jakub Krukar

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.

Author: Laura Meierkort

Supervisor: Christian Kray

Co-supervisor: Thomas Bartoscheck

Author: Jan Stenkamp

Supervisor: Judith Verstegen

Co-supervisor: Edzer Pebesma

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.

Author: Nikolai Gorte

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Edzer Pebesma

Co-supervisor: Dr. Christoph Stasch

PDF: bachelor_thesis_nikolai_gorte365.pdf

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.

Author: Clemens Hackenberg

Supervisor: Judith Verstegen

Co-supervisor: Derek Karssenberg (Utrecht University)

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.

Author: Chirstoph Kisfeld

Supervisor: Angela Schwering

Co-supervisor: Thomas Bartoschek

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.

Author: Julius Wittkopp

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Edzer Pebesma

Co-supervisor: Dr. Albert Remke

PDF: Bachelorarbeit_Julius_Wittkopp362.pdf

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.

Author: Dominik Schlarmann

Supervisor: Dr. Torsten Prinz

Co-supervisor: Thomas Bartoschek

PDF: Bachelorarbeit_Schlarmann330.pdf

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.

Author: Holger Fritze

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Edzer Pebesma

Co-supervisor: Prof. Iris Stewart-Frey

PDF: Bachelor-Thesis-Holger-Fritze680.pdf

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.

Author: Gerald Pape

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Christian Kray

Co-supervisor: Thomas Bartoschek

PDF: geraldpape_bsc_thesis215.pdf

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.

Author: Klaus Drerup

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Antonio Krüger

Co-supervisor: Prof. Dr. Edzer Pebesma

PDF: Klaus_Drerup_bachelor_thesis500.pdf

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.

Author: Gereon Duesmann

Supervisor: Carl Schultz

Co-supervisor: Angela Schwering

PDF: bscthesis_g_dues01947.pdf

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.

Author: Sofian Slimani

Supervisor: Christian Knoth

Co-supervisor: Marius Appel

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.

Author: Anja Schlaphorst

Supervisor: Thomas Bartoschek

Co-supervisor: Torsten Prinz

Author: Constantin Rulle

Supervisor: Judith Verstegen

Co-supervisor: Edzer Pebesma

Author: Lia Kirsch

Supervisor: Judith Verstegen, Angela Schwering

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

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

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

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

Contact

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

Author: Christoph Friedrich

Supervisor: Edzer Pebesma

Co-supervisor: Matthias Mohr

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.

Author: Jakob Altenstein

Supervisor: Chris Kray

openEO develops an open API to connect R, Python, and Javascript clients to big earth observation cloud back-ends in a simple and unified way. Back-ends process user-defined algorithms on remote sensing data sets within their cloud infrastructure. This thesis will evaluate and implement ways to run openEO user-defined algorithms in a Browser environment, e.g. through JavaScript, so that an algorithm can be fully executed on the client-side for an AOI selected by a user through a map. The required steps to achieve this are as follows:

1. A map is shown in the browser and the user navigates to an AOI
2. A user can select and load a cloud-native dataset for the AOI, e.g. stored as cloud-optimized GeoTiffs
3. An algorithm can be specified through openEO processes and the processing runs in the browser. A set of openEO processes for a use case has to be implemented by the student.
4. Finally, the data is visualized using a mapping/visualization library

This thesis should explore, implement, and evaluate one or multiple of these aspects. The scope of the thesis is designed to fit the requirements of a master thesis, but it can probably be split into multiple bachelor thesis, too. More information can be found in the openEO Browser Backend GitHub repository.

Contact

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

Author: Jorge Herrera

Supervisor: Edzer Pebesma

Co-supervisor: Matthias Mohr

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

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

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

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

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

Author: Nemanja Kostic

Supervisor: Simon Scheider

Author: Samuel Navas Medrano

Supervisor: Prof. Chris Kray

Co-supervisor: Holger fritze

Author: Oleg Stepanov

Supervisor: Judith Verstegen, Gilberto Câmara

Author: Simon Shoemaker

Supervisor: Edzer Pebesma

Public deliberation conducted by citizen initiatives is an important part of the democratic foundation of our society. Lists on Internet pages, meetings and newspaper advertisements are used as medium for informing the public. A more profound deliberation can be achieved through giving citizens the opportunity to actively participate. Although research of spatial discussion platforms exists, only few investigate the use of dialogs or even spatially enhanced dialogs. This thesis explores the support of public deliberation performed by citizen initiatives through spatially enhanced dialogs. In order to enable citizen initiatives to engage in dialogs, a prototypical spatial discussion platform was developed. Semi-structured and expert interviews, as well as a focus group, helped to evaluate how spatially enhanced dialogs support deliberation performed by citizen initiatives. In this context, the concept of spatially enhanced dialogs and the developed prototype were tested. The results show general understanding of the respondents for the concept. However, the conveyance of projects’ spatial characteristics appear to have a higher level of importance for evaluation participants.

Author: Gerald Pape

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Christian Kray

Co-supervisor: Thore Fechner

PDF: geraldpape_msc_thesis978.pdf

Virtual globes are an effective tool for visualisation and exploration. This thesis investigates whether a virtual globe is suited for the discovery of environmental sensors. Different kinds of sensor representations are discussed and - taking the increasing number of mobile sensors into account - also how to visualise sensor movements. Cartographic generalisation algorithms are applied to reduce the sensor density on the globe. Spatial, thematic and temporal filters narrow down the sensor search.

The concepts are implemented in a web-based virtual globe application. The application shall help citizen scientists finding sensors of other providers to calibrate their own sensors. For testing, metadata and real-time measurements of weather stations and smartphones are inserted into two Sensor Observation Services, which are harvested by a Sensor Instance Registry. A usability study evaluates the application. Based on the participants’ feedback, suggestions for improvement and for future research are outlined.

Author: Raimund Schnürer

Supervisor: Dipl.-Geoinf. Simon Jirka

Co-supervisor: Dipl.-Geoinf. Daniel Nüst

PDF: MasterThesis-Schnrer536.pdf

The usage of Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (MUAV) as mobile sensor platforms is constantly increasing in the scientific, as well as in the civilian sector. A variety of requirements evolve from upcoming mission tasks like documentation, surveying and inspection in agriculture and geography, as well as in the industry. Many applications, such as the creation of orthoimages or the inspection of industrial plants need accurate position information in real-time, both for safety-in-flight reasons and for enriching sensor data by the provision of location.

As current MUAVs make use of common Global Positioning System receivers and, therefore, do not guarantee reliable high-precision positioning, this work examines the demands on an improved Differential Global Navigation Satellite System (DGNSS) positioning system for its integration into an existing MUAV platform. It proposes a flexible system architecture and presents a modular prototype that offers the possibility to exchange discrete components for making use of more sophisticated technologies like Precise DGNSS. The described prototype already guarantees horizontal positioning accuracy of 35 cm in real-time, which can be considered as sufficient for the majority of applications.

Consequently, this work focuses on the integration of position and additional navigation data into an existing Sensor Platform Framework software, which is able to synchronize sensor and navigation information on-the-fly. It introduces a MUAV platform-specific Input-Plugin for decoding the telemetry data stream and for the communication with the framework. As the framework is able to forward the processed geodata in a standardized way according to the guidelines of the Open Geospatial Consortium Inc., the data can be exploited by any kind of Sensor Web Service in near real-time.

Author: Jakob Geipel

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Edzer Pebesma

Co-supervisor: Dr. Torsten Prinz

PDF: MasterarbeitJakobGeipel501.pdf

The proliferation of location-based services in recent years has highlighted the need to consider location privacy. This has led to the development of methods enhancing location privacy, and to the investigation of reasons for sharing location information. While computational attacks on location privacy and their prevention have attracted a lot of research, attacks based on human strategies and tactics have generally been considered implicitly. This work addresses this knowledge gap by reporting on a user study which was conducted in the context of a location-based game. Participants had to identify other players over the course of several weeks. The results show that human strategies for deanonymization and reidentication can be highly successful and thus pose a threat to location privacy comparable to computational attacks. By incorporating real-world knowledge that is not easily available in automated attacks, human players were able to eciently re-identify other people in the game.

Keywords: re-identication, deanonymization, location privacy.

Author: Thore Fechner

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Christian Kray

Co-supervisor: Prof. Dr. Antonio Krüger

PDF: msc_fechner165.pdf

People live in a world where space and time are two fundamental variables. Everything
people do is related to space and time. During their daily life people build up a cognitive map and rely on it in several wayfinding and navigation tasks. However conveying spatial information to other people is not obvious. Apart from referring to a map or absolute reference systems like coordinates, people use two main modalities for conveying spatial information: the textual mode and the graphical mode. The textual mode means both, conveying spatial information orally or written. Both modalities are used to externalise parts of peoples cognitive map by describing either textually or by sketching. Besides technical devices are used to support peoples spatial behaviour. This devices rely on the textual and graphical modalities in conveying spatial information as well.

Author: Heinrich Löwen

Supervisor: Angela Schwering

Co-supervisor: Stephan Winter

The usage of do-it-yourself (DIY) sensor stations based on open-source hardware for participatory sensing as a basis for large-scale sensor networks is a novel approach in the field of citizen science. In that context, DIY sensors can build a basis for large-scale sensor network applications. Since the installation is performed by non-professionals, extensive user support has to be provided in order to achieve satisfactory results.

The SenseBox is an open-source toolkit for participatory sensing, which offers well-documented tutorials for sensor applications based on Arduino microcontrollers. This system has been applied in scientific workshops with secondary school students to teach them programming in a playful and simple way. All data that is being collected with the SenseBox construction kits is published on OpenSenseMap, a platform for sharing open sensor data. There was an increasing demand of the DIY toolkits after the project was publicly promoted and the OpenSenseMap was officially launched. Consequently this approach was adopted to a standalone DIY sensor station for participatory sensing. A second version of the SenseBox was developed, which is more focusing on long-term deployments of local environments than on an educational approach.

After an initial test phase where citizens were equipped with SenseBox construction kits for continuous measurements, it was discovered that most of the stations were disconnected after a short time period. Subsequently a user study was performed to reveal possible error sources during the wiring process, software installation and integration into the sensor network. It turned out that missing general computer skills, like the installation of application software, led to larger problems than wiring of hardware parts.

This Thesis focuses on usability enhancements for the SenseBox and OpenSenseMap to enable citizen driven long-term deployments of DIY sensor stations in outdoor environments.

The research fields of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Usability Engineering (UE) provide well described guidelines and frameworks for designing intuitive user interfaces. These concepts can be adapted to the open hardware approach of SenseBox, the sensor registration on OpenSenseMap and the documentation material. Intermediate results of an ongoing test run are demonstrating that the usability of the project can be enhanced with the methods provided by the heuristics of UE.

Author: Jan Wirwahn

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Angela Schwering

Co-supervisor: Thomas Bartoschek

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

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

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

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

Die Arbeit kann auf Deutsch oder Englisch verfasst werden.

Author: Lukas Lohoff

Supervisor: Edzer Pebesma

Co-supervisor: Daniel Nüst

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.

Author: Renan Barroso

Supervisor: Judith Verstegen, Floor van der Hilst

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

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

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

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

Contact: Daniel Nüst
 

Author: Niklas George

Supervisor: Daniel Nüst

Co-supervisor: Edzer Pebesma

PDF: Master_thesis_Niklas_George_Zenodo153.pdf

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

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

Author: Zhihao Liu

Supervisor: Judith Verstegen, Albert Remke

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

Author: Clara Rendel

Supervisor: Judith Verstegen

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

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


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

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

 

Author: Brhane Bahrishum

Supervisor: Auriol Degbelo

Author: Mónica Magán da Fonseca

Supervisor: Judith Verstegen, Sebastian Völker

Author: Tamene Sinishaw Gelaye

Supervisor: Judith Verstegen

Author: Alicja Balfanz

Supervisor: Judith Verstegen

Co-supervisor: Harald Sodemann

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

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

Author: Sangeetha Shankar

Supervisor: Judith Verstegen, Lucas Schubert

Author: Ismail Sunni

Supervisor: Edzer Pebesma

Co-supervisor: Daniel Nüst

Parameterbasierte Identifikation von Realdaten-Streckenabschnitten im OpenDRIVE-Format

Author: Peter Konopatzky

Supervisor: Judith Verstegen

Author: David Alsina

Supervisor: Judith Verstegen, Philip Minderhoud

Mobility infrastructure has a great impact on the sustainable development of cities. An efficient non-motorized infrastructure can help Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by promoting public health (SDG 3.4), contributing to better air, water, and soil quality (SDG 3.9), increasing accessibility and affordability of public transportation (SDG 11.2), reducing the environmental impact in cities (SDG 11.6.), helping to climate control (SDG 13.2). German Sustainable Building Council (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Nachhaltiges Bauen- DGNB) provides comprehensive tools to assess the sustainability of buildings and neighborhoods in Germany since 2007. The tools are developed and updated regularly according to the SDGs and local sustainability strategies. Non-motorized traffic is covered by DGNB Quartier in 2020 with the aim of efficient use of resources, increased affordability, and increased user comfort which provides better experience and accessibility especially for people with reduced mobility.

BSc - In the scope of the BSc thesis, the focus will be given to the assessment of cycling infrastructure in Münster. The data collection and analysis will be based on the indicators defined by the German Sustainable Building Council (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Nachhaltiges Bauen- DGNB), Neighbourhood certification (DGNB Quartier) (sub section Technische Qualität - TEC 3.2). Data collection and analysis will include the assessment of quantity and quality of city’s existing cycling infrastructure such as integration of the cycling network to other transportation modes and land uses, the quantity and quality of bicycle parking spaces, and signalisation. The student will automate the assessment of indicators through an algorithm developed in SQL or Python, visualise the results on the preferred system, and recommend a roadmap for future applications to achieve maximum score (30 points) stated in the DGNB Quartier sustainability certification system.

MSc - The MSc thesis aims to create an interactive City Dashboard for Münster focusing on cycling infrastructure in the city centre.  Complementary to the data collection and analysis processes described in the BSc thesis, the student is expected to develop a web-based, interactive dashboard that enables users of the city to monitor the status quo of the cycling infrastructure and investigate the impact of possible interventions (e.g. increasing the amount of the cycling paths or bicycle parking spaces) on the overall quality of non-motorised mobility infrastructure.  

References:

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Nachhaltiges Bauen (2020), DGNB Quartiere Kriterienkatalog, https://static.dgnb.de/fileadmin/dgnb-system/de/quartiere/kriterien/DGNB-Kriterienkatalog-Quartiere-Kommentierungsversion-2020.pdf

Author: Fabian Fermazin (BSc), Lorenz Beck (MSc)

Supervisor: Simge Özdal Oktay

Visualizations of spatial data on large displays could be very useful during the exploration of large spatial datasets. A key issue in this context is the design of natural interaction (e.g. interaction with freehand gestures and/or speech-based interaction) to support exploratory data analysis tasks (e.g. panning, zooming, selection, aggregation, annotation). This thesis aims to explore strategies to facilitate the interaction with spatial data on large displays using freehand gestures. Tasks include:

Task 1: implementation of a software module to reliably map the position of users’ hands to the screen’s positions.

Task 2: implementation of a software module that enables panning and zooming with maps via freehand gestures on a large display.

Task 3: evaluation of the software modules (e.g. performance, usability, usefulness).

The immersive video environment will serve as a prototypical large display during the study. Programming skills (C++, C# or VB.NET) will be an advantage.

Contact

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

Samuel Navas Medrano (s.navas@uni-muenster.de)

Readings

Bartoschek, T., Pape, G., Kray, C., Jones, J. and Kauppinen, T. (2014) ‘Gestural interaction with spatiotemporal linked open data’, OSGeo Journal, 13(1), pp. 60–67.

Nancel, M., Wagner, J., Pietriga, E., Chapuis, O. and Mackay, W. (2011) ‘Mid-air pan-and-zoom on wall-sized displays’, in Tan, D. S., Amershi, S., Begole, B., Kellogg, W. A., and Tungare, M. (eds) Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI ’11. Vancouver, Canada: ACM Press, pp. 177–186. doi: 10.1145/1978942.1978969.

Author: Jonas Hurst

Supervisor: Auriol degbelo

Co-supervisor: Christian Kray

Visualisation is an important tool in explorative analysis and new technologies provide an unprecedented amount of live environmental sensor data. Interpolations derive data with high spatial coverage from these in-situ observations. This work develops methods to combine the visualisation of sensor platforms and interpolations based upon their observations to increase the understanding of the observed dynamic environmental phenomenon. These techniques span across visual variables such as animation, colour or size, and are supplemented with a variety of visual aides to facilitate interpretation in a three-dimensional real-time visualisation environment. A software prototype joins existing technologies to present new techniques for visualisation on a virtual globe. It successfully renders live data from an unmanned aerial vehicle in a test deployment. A user study investigates the developed solutions. This study supports the hypothesis that a user’s understanding of a phenomenon can be improved with a real-time, integrated visualisation of sensor positions and interpolation. An extensive discussion identiVes the useful techniques, features and architecture components for the targeted application.

Author: Daniel Nüst

Supervisor: Edzer Pebesma

Co-supervisor: Werner Kuhn