1. Leipzig Location Navigator
Discover Barrier-free Accessible Locations with the Location Navigator
Abicht, Ackermann and Martin
This presentation is licensed CC-BY 4.0 , Authors: Michael Martin, Jörg Unbehauen , Icons on this page: All rights reserved
Speaker: Jörg Unbehauen, E-Mail: unbehauen@informatik.uni-leipzig.de

2. Motivation - The Story So Far
● cooperation with non-profit organization Behindertenverband Leipzig e.V.
(BVL) to develop a showcase for Open Data in Open E-Government
● part of the LEDS research project (leds-projekt.de)
Leipzig City (Sozialamt) Behindertenverband Leipzig e.V.
Leipzig University (AKSW)
finances
cooperate

3. Motivation - The Story So Far
● people with disabilities need reliable and qualitative information
○ especially if they visit places, never visited before
■ are lifts available,
■ toilets suitable for wheelchairs
● BVL informs on places/buildings ...
○ website
○ phone
● BVL is a major source / partner for people with disabilities

4. Show Case: Our approach
(Linked)
Open Data
E-Government and
Public Administration
Software
Engineering
Topic: People with Disabilities

5. About the Data
Entrance(s)
Lift
Toilet
Parking Lot
Facts:
● over 70 metrics about a
location
● data is collected
manually by experts
● currently German based
terms

6. Data Lifecycle

7. Data fuels the Location Navigator
Enriched
CSV
Tailored
JSON
All data is published under an Open Data friendly license

8. Icons from http://www.le-online.de/zeichenengl.htm
Icons
Entrance
Lift
Toilet
Fully suitable
for wheelchairs
Partly suitable
for wheelchairs
Assistance for the deaf and hard of
hearing
Assistance for the blind and visually
impaired
Special personal assistance for
people with disabilities
Marked disabled parking spaces
available

9. Target groups and goals
People
with disabilities
All people
Focus on user needs:
● easy to understand navigation
● few clicks required to find a
location
● reader support (WAI-ARIA)
Developer friendly:
● Usage of JavaScript helps, if
certain coding pattern are use
● usage of understandable
design pattern
● structured code with many
comments
Rookies and
advanced persons
Experts

10. Usage: Welcome screen with Preselection

11. Usage: Overview with filter area and map
Filter and
locations
Map

12. Usage: Result list with reduced map (Mobile view)
List of matching
locations
● Icons are annotated with WAI-ARIA labels
● compatible readers can read related information,
e.g. “Leipzig Opera has parking lot which is
suitable for wheelchairs”

13. References
Wheelmap https://wheelmap.org
● Crowd based and no data evaluation
● Coarse labels
Maps without barriers http://web.mapybezbarier.cz/en/about-project/
● similar to Wheelmap, but also provides filters like Location Navigator
● not limited to locations of only one commune

14. References
The Great Britain Toilet Map https://greatbritishpublictoiletmap.rca.ac.uk/
● one project goal is also to demonstrate usefulness of Open Data
● poor support of visual impaired or blind people
● data focus is on toilets only
OpenStreetMap https://openstreetmap.org
● service which provides crowd based geo-related content
● for some locations, very basic accessibility information are provided

15. Linked Data Usage
● Linked Data and RDF were initial conversion targets
● RDF and SPARQL based technologies were tested extensively, using
rdfstore-js (JavaScript based In Memory Store)
○ Performance issues, but reasons were unclear
○ Gap between graph data model and tree based data models of js-frameworks
● Refactored to csv-> json pipeline
● Planned csv -> rdf -> json pipeline
○ Integrate data into navigator ?
● Integrate data into Leipzig Open Data Portal

16. Conclusion, Future Work and Vision
● WAI-AIRA conform Web Application
● CSV based data export
● improve Location Navigator based on further feedback from the community
(BVL provides a good discussion platform here)
● Data Exposition
● Provide data as RDF, besides current CSV

17. Acknowledgement
17This presentation is licensed CC-BY 4.0 , Author: Konrad Abicht , Icons on this page: All rights reserved