Scientific profile

Peter Ranacher holds a Bachelor’s degree in Geography at Graz University, and a Master’s degree in Geospatial Technologies at NAWI Graz – an interdisciplinary research programme at Graz University and Graz University of Technology.

His fields of interests include geoscience in general, as well as moving objects, navigation and socio-economic aspects of traffic phenomena in particular. In his Master thesis he designed and developed a social networking system with a geographic-coordinative background featuring a ride-sharing application that enables users to offer car rides between two locations to other members in the network. The system was awarded the first prize in the GoGeo09 contest organized by the Bavarian Information and Communication Cluster (BICC).

At the Doctoral College GIScience, at the University of Salzburg, Peter Ranacher will carry out research on moving objects and their trajectories, mostly concentrating on spatio-temporal representations, mobility data mining and movement pattern recognition.

In addition to GIScience, Peter is currently studying the Russian language and has a strong interest in Russian culture, language and literature.

Research Cluster

Spatialization, Media and Society

PhD Thesis Topic

Understanding patterns in urban traffic trajectories

Abstract:

Today's presence of ubiquitous positioning devices allows for recording detailed traces of human movement in space and time. In contrast to the abundance of human trajectory data, methods on how to process these data in order to retrieve valuable information on reoccurring patterns of human mobility are still scarce. This proposal provides a conceptual framework for defining movement patterns which occur in human urban mobility. Furthermore, it introduces an iterative empirical approach for identifying and validating patterns in real world floating car trajectory data. Thus, it offers a deeper insight into human mobility in general and urban traffic phenomena in particular.

Supervisors

Publications

Research

 | Moving Objects | Mobility and Traffic Phenomena | Geographic Information Science | Data Mining |