Kick-off Meeting AccessibleMap

On April 1, 2011 the FFG BENEFIT funded project AccessibleMap started.

AccessibleMap aims to give better access to online web-based maps, especially city maps, for people with visual impairments. The goal is to improve the orientation of the target group in cities, and therefore to support their mobility and independence. AccessibleMap focuses on a semantic spatial description based on the user’s needs and requirements, ÖAW-GIScience as scientific partner contributes with developing methods to create cognitive or mental maps that include relevant information.

CEIT ALANOVA (lead partner), Compass-Verlag GmbH, Hilfsgemeinschaft der Blinden und Sehschwachen Österreichs, Positec Technologie Entwicklungs GmbH, Sabine Hennig & Fritz Zobl ÖAW-GIScience.

Bernhard Vockner receiving EDC Salzburg 'Best Student Award'!

This year’s annual ESRI Development Center 'best student award' nomination goes to
     Bernhard VOCKNER
for his MSc thesis in Applied Geoinformatics titled "Application development for mobile environmental data acquisition – a prototype for Berchtesgaden National Park"

In cooperation with Berchtesgaden National Park and the Research Studio iSPACE Bernhard Vockner developed a solution for simple, workflow-centric field data acquisition with mobile devices on ArcGIS Mobile. Decisive for this choice was the enhanced performance of Smartphones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), facilitating advanced mobile applications for environmental data acquisition. With their multitude of functions, many currently available products are tailored for expert users. However, numerous potential end users are domain experts having little or no prior GIS-knowledge.

Based on the principle that ‘GIS must be simple to use’, a mobile and context-sensitive prototype application was developed. Above all, the application features intuitive simplicity of operations adapted to the key requirement of automated recording of specific spatial information by domain experts (e.g. zoologists). Thus, technical functions on the client side focus clearly on users’ key requirements. A requirements analysis demonstrated that in this case, point or line feature collection via GPS, intuitive attribute data input and photographic documentation for each record were most frequently requested by the target group and therefore implemented in the mobile application. To validate the usability of the application, a usability testing procedure was carried out.

Congratulations to Bernhard Vockner’s for receiving this outstanding recognition for this thesis submitted in 2010 at the University of Salzburg Centre for Geoinformatics and graded as ‘excellent’.

Thomas Jekel, Keynote at HGD-Symposium

Thomas Jekel, senior researcher at ÖAW-GIScience, introduced "Learning with Geoinformation" to the audience at the HGD-Symposium Ludwigsburg 2011: Räumliche Orientierung, Karten und Geoinformation im Unterricht, 7. April 2011.
Abstract (German)