New DFG-funded research project in the priority programme „Volunteered Geographic Information“

Data is increasingly available to the public and is generated in parts by the public itself. Geographical data play a special role: traffic data, air measurements, animal observations, public web posts and much other information provide interesting insights into how we live together and deal with our environment. Wouldn't it be exciting to learn first-hand - directly from the data - what is really happening in my city or how nature around me is reacting to climate change?

In the new research project, we want to evaluate the publicly available data and return the results to the general public. The focus of the project is to explore particularly understandable and self-explanatory representations for geographical data. We are developing methods that automatically generate interactive reports from data. These will include understandable visual representations of the data as well as personalized explanations that summarize relevant insights. In doing so, we want to contribute to the democratization of the data, which is now not only available to everyone, but  also becomes easy to understand through our methods.

The project entitled "vgiReports: Accessible Reporting of Spatiotemporal Geographic Information Leveraging Generated Text and Visualization" is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) with approximately 220,000 EUR over three years and is embedded in a priority programme on „Volunteered Geographic Information“.

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