At the DVW Rhineland-Palatinate webinar “Ready for the Future—Working Together for Our Next Generation of Professionals” on June 10, 2021, three students majoring in Geoinformatics and Surveying at Mainz University of Applied Sciences were awarded the Harbert Book Prize. We extend our warmest congratulations to Lukas Haas, Tom Weichold, and Andreas Becker!
Each year, the top graduates of the bachelor’s and master’s programs in geodesy receive this award, which is named after Dr. Egbert Harbert, who served as chairman of the DVW from 1950 to 1953.
Lukas Haas received the award for his bachelor’s thesis titled “Determination of Alignment Elements from a Graphic Design Digitized in QGIS.” He was advised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Renate Czommer. For his bachelor’s thesis, Lukas Haas developed a plugin for the open-source geographic information system QGIS in Python. This plugin enables road planners to determine a customized sequence of curved segments based on local curvatures from a sequence of digitized points along an existing or planned route and to display it in QGIS (see cover image).
Tom Weichold wrote his master’s thesis on the topic “Automatic Modeling of Building Cross-Sections from Point Clouds.” He was supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Fredie Kern. In building surveying, tachymetric surveying is increasingly being replaced by laser scanning. To interpret the building geometry, building sections are generated from the collected data, a process that requires a great deal of manual effort. In his master’s thesis, Tom Weichold developed a methodology to reduce this effort. With the implementation of his application, it is possible to generate cross-sections that can be supplemented into a finished cross-section drawing with minimal manual effort.
Automatically generated floor plan (left) and manually derived floor plan for comparison (right). The apartment in the example shown was fully furnished and occupied at the time the data was captured. The point cloud was not cleaned up before applying the implemented algorithm. The black dots in the image represent the laser scanner’s positions.
Graphics: Tom Weichold, CC BY-SA 4.0
In his master’s thesis titled “Evaluation and Improvement of the Quality of Geodata for the ‘Drainage & Sanitation Development Plan’ in Mbeya, Tanzania,” Andreas Becker developed a structured approach for creating data models. The thesis was written as part of the part-time Master’s program in Geoinformatics and was supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hartmut Müller . The background to this work is international development projects, in which geodata is often available that comes from various sources and whose structure and quality are not documented. The guideline developed in this thesis is intended primarily to serve as a foundation for future projects in this field.
