Landmark extraction and communication in wayfinding directions

Abstract:

I propose a model of measuring the salience of a specific class of spatial features: fades of buildings. The locally most salient features are considered as landmarks, or as the features people refer to when giving wayfinding directions. This model will be adapted to abilities and preferences of user groups of wayfinding services. I will prove the hypothesis that focalization can be sufficiently modelled by weights of salience measures. The long term goal is to identify sets of weights for typical foci of user groups. In a second part of the talk, I will report on our first findings to investigate the understanding of landmarks in narratives, considering wayfinding directions as narratives. We demonstrate how the initial experience - the landmark - is incorporated into communication structures, how it turns into a narrative in order to secure understanding and how understanding is guided via narrative structures. Our final interest is in computer generated route directions, as provided by navigation services. We will show that simply referring to landmarks in route directions is not sufficient for successful communication.

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Enquiries: sals@ics.mq.edu.au