Place descriptions by landmarks

Abstract

Humans often describe places by landmarks in natural language. However, there is no appropriate digital representation of human concepts of place -a so far elusive concept -for use in information systems. This paper proposes and tests a formal model to capture the concept of place in human perception by transferring the concept of fingerprints from robotics: a place being characterized by the landmarks around it. For the purpose of realistically testing whether places can be described by fingerprints, an algorithm for computing places from fingerprints and, independently, an in situ survey to capture these places and their fingerprints were designed. The results indicate that the union of all locations with the same fingerprint characterizes a 'place' in human cognition.

Positioning Locality Using Cognitive Directions Based on Indoor Landmark Reference System

“…When considering the shape of the ROs, Liu [ 10 ] proposed a general probabilistic method for positioning locality, which can combine a set of uncertain spatial relations (e.g., distances and directions). Zhou [ 20 ] described a conceptual model of fingerprints from locality descriptions by landmarks to capture the concept of place in human perception.…”

“…Landmarks play a crucial role in human spatial cognition, whether as a navigational aid or a locality description [ 20 , 21 ]. As the first step of spatial knowledge acquisition, landmarks, which have attracted the interest of many researchers, play a crucial role in the acquisition and the representation of human spatial knowledge in daily life [ 21 , 22 , 23 ].…”

“…Zhu [ 27 ] provided a method to compute the saliency of the POIs (points of interest), i.e., shops, to extract indoor landmarks. When compared with navigation, all kinds of landmarks can play a greater role in the context of locality description [ 20 ]. Therefore, the concept of landmarks is based on all kinds of indoor POIs (i.e., shops).…”

Location-based mobile learning applications: A conceptual framework for co-design

“…A partir de esta observación el equipo podría generar una descripción gráfica del lugar (como se propone en [19]), por ejemplo, mediante un bosquejo o plano. En dicho bosquejo, se podrían especificar posibles elementos del lugar que se consideren relevantes (al estilo de lo presentado en [20], donde se los denomina landmarks). Por ejemplo, se podría indicar en el bosquejo donde está posicionado el cartel de bienvenida.…”

“…Los objetos incluidos en los bosquejos, son denominados generalmente "landmarks", y pueden servir como puntos de referencia [20]. Se debe tener en cuenta que estos landmarks podrían ser temporales, es decir, variar en el tiempo.…”