Lorenz Hurni


Last Name

Hurni

First Name

Lorenz

ORCID

0000-0002-0453-8743

Organisational unit

03466 - Hurni, Lorenz / Hurni, Lorenz

Search Results

Publications 1 - 10 of 127
  • Swiss World Atlas in Class Room – How to teach with maps
    Item type: Other Conference Item
    Zimmermann, Wenke; Hurni, Lorenz (2019)
    Abstracts of the ICA
  • Unlocking the Geospatial Past with Deep Learning – Establishing a Hub for Historical Map Data in Switzerland
    Item type: Other Conference Item
    Heitzler, Magnus; Hurni, Lorenz (2019)
    Abstracts of the ICA
  • A roadmap for generative mapping: unlocking the power of generative AI for map-making
    Item type: Working Paper
    Wu, Sidi; Henggeler, Katharina; Chen, Yizi; et al. (2024)
    arXiv
    Maps are broadly relevant across various fields, serving as valuable tools for presenting spatial phenomena and communicating spatial knowledge. However, map-making is still largely confined to those with expertise in GIS and cartography due to the specialized software and complex workflow involved, from data processing to visualization. While generative AI has recently demonstrated its remarkable capability in creating various types of content and its wide accessibility to the general public, its potential in generating maps is yet to be fully realized. This paper highlights the key applications of generative AI in map-making, summarizes recent advancements in generative AI, identifies the specific technologies required and the challenges of using current methods, and provides a roadmap for developing a generative mapping system (GMS) to make map-making more accessible.
  • Engineers of Map Art
    Item type: Monograph
    Hurni, Lorenz; Raubal, Martin; Eichenberger, Thomas; et al. (2025)
    This publication provides a comprehensive overview of 170 years of cartography at ETH Zurich and pays tribute to the personalities who have contributed to the development of the discipline. It is published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation and highlights its contribution to science and practice.
  • The Light Source Metaphor Revisited—Bringing an Old Concept for Teaching Map Projections to the Modern Web
    Item type: Journal Article
    Heitzler, Magnus; Bär, Hans Rudolf; Schenkel, Roland; et al. (2019)
    ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information
    Map projections are one of the foundations of geographic information science and cartography. An understanding of the different projection variants and properties is critical when creating maps or carrying out geospatial analyses. The common way of teaching map projections in text books makes use of the light source (or light bulb) metaphor, which draws a comparison between the construction of a map projection and the way light rays travel from the light source to the projection surface. Although conceptually plausible, such explanations were created for the static instructions in textbooks. Modern web technologies may provide a more comprehensive learning experience by allowing the student to interactively explore (in guided or unguided mode) the way map projections can be constructed following the light source metaphor. The implementation of this approach, however, is not trivial as it requires detailed knowledge of map projections and computer graphics. Therefore, this paper describes the underlying computational methods and presents a prototype as an example of how this concept can be applied in practice. The prototype will be integrated into the Geographic Information Technology Training Alliance (GITTA) platform to complement the lesson on map projections.
  • Hypercube-based visualization architecture for web-based environmental geospatial information systems
    Item type: Conference Paper
    Iosifescu Enescu, Ionuţ; Vescoukis, Vassilios; Iosifescu Enescu, Cristina M.; et al. (2015)
    The Cartographic Journal
    The geospatial field significantly influences the development of the environmental domain, including a wide range of geospatial and cartographic information systems, such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Multimedia Atlas Information Systems (MAIS) and more recently web-based GIS (Web-GIS). In this context, we introduce web-based environmental geospatial information systems (Web-EGIS) as a special case of Web-GIS, aiming to integrate the functionalities of geospatial information systems with the enormous quantity of specialized, distributed and highly heterogeneous environmental geo-referenced data and services. We define three main characteristics of the Web-EGIS. The first is a generic hypercube-based data organization and visualization. The next characteristic is a standard-based, three-tier service-oriented architecture. The third and last characteristic is the traceability of the architectural and design decisions, for which we introduce the new concept of an ‘Environmental Application Context’, arguing that not only the functional but also the non-functional requirements (NFRs) have an important role in defining the architecture, software components and data services of such systems. In a nutshell, a Web-EGIS is characterized by a coherent user experience through the hypercube-based visualization concept, technically supported by a service-oriented architecture that is structured according to an extensive analysis of NFRs. On this basis, we introduce the Geodata visualization and interactive training environment (GeoVITe) Platform for Interdisciplinary Environmental Research as a reference implementation of a Web-EGIS with its basic design requirements, integrative hypercube-based visualization for heterogeneous data sources, extended web cartography functionalities, and its de facto system architecture. The concept of the hypercube-based visualization is better transferred to the system architecture by understanding the ‘Environmental Application Context’ of this particular Web-EGIS, which also makes it easier to maintain and enhance. The resulting system is a support platform for research activities in the environmental domain.
  • Future National Atlases – Strategies for Tearing Down the User’s Firewall
    Item type: Other Conference Item
    Sieber, René; Hurni, Lorenz (2022)
    Abstracts of the ICA
  • Eduard: beautiful relief shading with neural networks
    Item type: Other Conference Item
    Jenny, Bernhard; Singh, Dilpreet; Heitzler, Magnus; et al. (2022)
    Eduard is a new application that computes beautiful and accurate shaded relief images that are indistinguishable from hand-drawn shadings. Eduard creates shaded reliefs that follow design principles of manual relief shading, such as removing unnecessary terrain details, locally adjusting the illumination direction, accentuating high peaks with aerial perspective, and emphasizing large landforms. Eduard enables cartographers to create Swiss-style shaded relief with neural networks within seconds from digital elevation models and will be released at NACIS 2022 at https:// eduard.earth.
  • Domain adaptation in segmenting historical maps: A weakly supervised approach through spatial co-occurrence
    Item type: Journal Article
    Wu, Sidi; Schindler, Konrad; Heitzler, Magnus; et al. (2023)
    ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing
    Historical maps depict past states of the Earth's surface and make it possible to trace the natural or anthropogenic evolution of geographic objects back through time. However, the state of the depicted reality is not the only source of change: maps of varying age can differ in terms of graphical design, and also in terms of storage conditions, physical ageing of pigments, and the scanning process for digitization. Consequently, a computer vision system learned from a specific (source) map series will often not generalize well to older or newer (target) maps, calling for domain adaptation. In the present paper we examine – to our knowledge for the first time – domain adaptation for segmenting historical maps. We argue that for geo-spatial data like maps, which are geo-localized by definition, the spatial co-occurrence of geographical objects provides a supervision signal for domain adaptation. Since only a subset of all mapped objects co-occur, and even those are not perfectly aligned due to both real topographic changes and variations in map generalization/production, they only provide weak supervision — still they can bring a substantial benefit over completely unsupervised domain adaptation methods. The core of our proposed method is a novel self-supervised co-occurrence network that detects co-occurring objects across maps (specifically, domains) with a novel loss function that allows for object changes and spatial misalignment. Experiments show that, for the task of segmenting hydrological objects such as rivers, lakes and wetlands, our system significantly outperforms two state-of-art baselines, even with limited supervision (e.g., 5%). The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/sian-wusidi/spatialcooccurrence.
  • Archiving Printed and Digital Atlases – How to keep the «Atlas of Switzerland» available for future generations
    Item type: Other Conference Item
    Sieber, René; Hurni, Lorenz (2023)
    Abstracts of the ICA
    Printed and digital atlases are fine pieces of art – maps and figures are uniquely created and visualized from raw data, and specific tools or customized layouts and interfaces are designed to strongly convey a clear message to the user. During the whole atlas building and production process, authors are fully engaged in creating and updating the atlas concept, in data acquisition, in the cartographic visualization process and the technical workflow, in a lot of problems and publication issues, and in the project management. However, throughout the whole period of atlas development, the pending problem of how to archive and make accessible such complex products as atlases after the active phase of their life cycle is not addressed. Since the national «Atlas of Switzerland», published in printed editions (1965–1997) and digital versions (2000– today), faces exactly that situation of lacking a consistent archiving strategy, we want to address the challenge by developing some practical guidelines for preserving and reusing atlas information. Discussions with library experts at ETH Zurich showed various fields of actions and aspects, considering the main viewpoints of external archiving (for public use) and internal archiving (for expert use). External archiving requires, for both printed and digital atlases, a systematic recording and filing of the atlas product. For cataloging, one can work according to standards, e.g., MARC21/RDA [https://www.loc.gov/librarians/standards] and ISO 19165-1:2018 preservation of digital geographic information [https://www.iso.org/standard/67325.html?browse=tc]. Moreover, digital atlases are confronted with the challenge of incompatibility of the technical atlas client with future hardware or software versions. Because digital atlases are often closed systems (on CD-ROM, DVD, online shell), a possible solution for the digital versions of the «Atlas of Switzerland» could be a client emulation, meaning that older (technically outdated) products can run (partly) on newer operating systems by means of dedicated software [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emulator]. Internal archiving of atlas material is even more demanding; it includes project management information (letters, contracts), database (geometries, attributes), multimedia (text, pictures, sound, etc.), metadata (sources), repositories (workflow description, tools and plugins), and software source code. In this context, the question of the preservation levels to be aimed at must also be asked [https://www.tib.eu/en/tib/policies/preservation-policy]: • Bitstream preservation: This merely involves saving and preserving the bitstream (i.e., from atlas data/code to visualization) by monitoring and exchanging the storage media. No action is taken to support preservation at the logical file format level. Bitstream preservation is the lowest preservation level. • Logical preservation: The long-term availability and legibility of objects is ensured at the file format level. Logical preservation ensures the executability of objects. • Semantic preservation: Semantic preservation ensures long-term interpretability at the contextual level. Any context information required is recorded in accompanying metadata (representation information) and checked at regular intervals to ensure it is up to date. In line with migration at the logical level, metadata can be migrated and versioned at the contextual level. Concerning the long-term project «Atlas of Switzerland», it is planned to preserve information on all three levels of longterm archiving. It is important to save not only the source code or a compiled version on the bitstream level, but also the file formats on a logical level. Finally, the semantic preservation seems to be most important, since the atlas project is evolving in time, techniques, and also staff members. Therefore, it is essential to preserve the history, the concepts and ideas, and also their realization/implementation into an atlas user interface, together with interactive tools and maps. In order to achieve these goals, a documentation of the look & feel of the former «Atlas of Switzerland» versions as well as a recording of the interactive atlas functionality seems to be a viable way. In this contribution, we will present the current situation and some hands-on solutions for the «Atlas of Switzerland» project, and discuss future means like a storybook to link different kinds of material for archiving atlases.
Publications 1 - 10 of 127