Kai-Florian Richter and Stephan Winter: Landmarks—GIScience for Intelligent Services

Excerpt

Landmarks have been a major issue of interest among researchers in spatial cognition and behavior, particularly since the systematic examination of people’s images of cities by Kevin Lynch [1]. Lynch described landmarks as a major element of physical environments, together with paths, edges, districts, and nodes. These elements “stick out” in the environment and attract people’s attention; thus being important foci of attention in the environment, landmarks also constitute a major element of people’s knowledge about the environment [2]. In other words, they “anchor” mental representations of the environment in people’s minds [3]. As important elements for structuring physical and psychological environments, landmarks play critical roles in navigational directions for guiding people around, either given verbally (verbal instructions) or graphically (hand-drawn sketch maps). This book focuses on how landmarks can be (or should be) used on an intelligent navigation system, so that the system and the user interact with each other adaptively, the system “behaving” as the user does and helping (and augmenting) the user’s wayfinding and decision making (pp. 206–207). …