Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services PDF
Preview Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services
Kai-Florian Richter · Stephan Winter Landmarks GIScience for Intelligent Services Landmarks Kai-Florian Richter • Stephan Winter Landmarks GIScience for Intelligent Services 123 Kai-FlorianRichter StephanWinter DepartmentofGeography DepartmentofInfrastructureEngineering UniversityofZurich UniversityofMelbourne Zurich,Switzerland Parkville,VIC,Australia ISBN978-3-319-05731-6 ISBN978-3-319-05732-3(eBook) DOI10.1007/978-3-319-05732-3 SpringerChamHeidelbergNewYorkDordrechtLondon LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2014936632 ©SpringerInternationalPublishingSwitzerland 2014 Thisworkissubjecttocopyright.AllrightsarereservedbythePublisher,whetherthewholeorpartof thematerialisconcerned,specificallytherightsoftranslation,reprinting,reuseofillustrations,recitation, broadcasting,reproductiononmicrofilmsorinanyotherphysicalway,andtransmissionorinformation storageandretrieval,electronicadaptation,computersoftware,orbysimilarordissimilarmethodology nowknownorhereafterdeveloped.Exemptedfromthislegalreservationarebriefexcerptsinconnection with reviews or scholarly analysis or material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. 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Printedonacid-freepaper SpringerispartofSpringerScience+BusinessMedia(www.springer.com) DedicatedtoAnja andElisabeth Preface Navigarenecesseest (attributedtoGnaeusPompeiusMagnus) Landmarksareafascinatingsubjectofresearch.Ononehandtheyareubiquitousin our thinking and speaking about our living environment. We refer to them when describing our internalized image of place or when describing where we are or wherewewillmeet.Touristbrochurestrytoconveytheimageofaplacebyreferring to its landmarks Paris is the Eiffel Tower, the Seine river, Notre Dame, and the Louvre.Thefirst-timetouristarrivinginParismaynotknowmoreaboutthatplace than these landmarks. Experts call this landmark knowledge and see landmarks as building blocks of more complex spatial knowledge such as route or survey knowledge. But despite their fundamental role for spatial knowledge, landmarks aresurprisinglydifficulttodefineandcharacterize.Asaconsequence,theyarealso difficulttocaptureinformalmodelsforcomputationandinformationservices. To put it bluntly there is a gap between the way how people memorize, think, and talk about their environments and the capacity of information services to store, analyze, or interact with people about environments.A landmark is neither a feature type in current spatial databases, nor do the database taxonomies reveal anythingofthenatureoflandmarks.Letusjustcheckwiththeaboveexamplesof landmarks.Insteadofbelongingtoasingletypelandmarkinaspatialdatabase,they actuallybelongtoverydifferenttypes:inthiscasetower,river,churchbuilding,and museum,or,athigherlevelsofabstraction,man-madeornaturalobjects.Databases arealsorestrictedbytheirgeometricapproachtodescribelocation,whilelandmarks would require a qualitative rather than quantitative approach. Natural language expressionssuchas“infrontoftheLouvre”or“notfarfromNotreDame”arehard tointerpretbymeansofavectorgeometryusedincurrentspatialdatabases.Arich number of similar examples can be cited to support that using current services is notintuitiveinthissenseor,putdifferently,thattheseservicesarenotintelligentin thesenseofTuring’senvisionedintelligentmachine[6,7].Andtheseservicesreach far into our lives by answering the fundamentalwhere and when questions in any vii viii Preface context.Theyincludeservicessuchassimplesearch,webmapping,mobilelocation- based services, mobile guides, car navigation services, public transport planners, and emergency call centers, as they involve more and more natural language interaction. Thisbookwilladdressthisgap.Itisreportingonlatestresearchonlandmarksin geographicenvironmentsandpracticalapplicationsofthisresearchininformation serviceprovisions.Itcoversaspectrumofdisciplinaryfieldsencompassedbywhat has been called cognitive computation by some or spatial cognitive engineering by others. The disciplines involved are from life sciences (neurosciences), social sciences (psychology,cognitivescience, linguistics), engineering(artificialintelli- gence,informationsystems),physicalandmathematicalsciences(geomatics),and humanities(geography,philosophy). The reader can expect from this book a broad scope covering perceptual and cognitive aspects of natural and artificial cognitive systems, conceptual aspects of trying to define and formally model these insights, computationalaspects with respecttoidentifyingorselectinglandmarksforvariouspurposes,andcommunica- tion aspects of human-computerinteractionfor spatial informationprovision.The originofthebookgoesbacktoourown,originallyseparateworkoncomputational issues of landmarks,whichstarted abouta decadeago, perhapskickedoff by one particular,frequentlycitedpaper[4].Ofcourse,landmarkswerebythenalreadya well-studiedtopicinspatialcognitionresearch(e.g.,[2,3,5]).Arichbodyofwork had been developed, which we will present in this book in a systematic manner, includingoutliningthestillopenquestions.Portionsofthepresentedideasledalso totheworld-firstcommercialnavigationserviceusinglandmarksselectedbasedon cognitiveprinciples[1]. Accordingly, the purpose of this book is to provide a review of this line of research,structuredintocognitive,conceptual,computational,andcommunication aspects.Thisisinparticularvaluablebecauseitrepresentsasynopsisofresearchin differentdisciplinesandthusnotonlyaddressesabreadthoftopicsbutalsobridges betweendifferenttraditionsofthinking.Itisalsotimelysincetheresearchinthese fourareashasreachedlevelsthatallowforafirsttimeaconsistentsynopsis. Theintendedaudienceofthispublicationarecertainlygraduateorpostgraduate students—theywill profitfrom a compactreader summarizingand synthesizing a largenumberof researchpapers—butbeyondthatalso the interestedpublic,from the enthusiastic geeks maintaining crowd-sourced datasets like OpenStreetMap, over the early adaptors of novel tools such as navigation services, to the curious people being interested why certain things are so hard for computers ...such as thinkingaboutourenvironmentslikewehumansdo. Zurich,Switzerland Kai-FlorianRichter Parkville,VIC,Australia StephanWinter March22,2014 References ix References 1.Duckham, M., Winter, S., Robinson, M.: Including landmarks in routing instructions. J. Location-BasedServ.4(1),28–52(2010) 2.Lynch,K.:TheImageoftheCity.TheMITPress,Cambridge(1960) 3.Presson, C.C., Montello, D.R.: Points of reference in spatial cognition: stalking the elusive landmark.Br.J.Dev.Psychol.6,378–381(1988) 4.Raubal,M.,Winter,S.:Enrichingwayfindinginstructionswithlocallandmarks.In:Egenhofer, M.J.,Mark,D.M.(eds.)GeographicInformationScience.LectureNotesinComputerScience, vol.2478,pp.243–259.Springer,Berlin(2002) 5.Sorrows,M.E.,Hirtle,S.C.:Thenatureoflandmarksforrealandelectronicspaces.In:Freksa, C., Mark, D.M. (eds.) Spatial Information Theory. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1661,pp.37–50.Springer,Berlin(1999) 6.Turing,A.M.:Computingmachineryandintelligence.Mind59(236),433–460(1950) 7.Winter,S.,Wu,Y.:Intelligentspatialcommunication.In:Navratil,G.(ed.)ResearchTrendsin GeographicInformationScience,pp.235–250.Springer,Berlin(2009)
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