Using the Spatial Knowledge of Map Users to Personalize City Maps: A Case Study with Tourists in Madrid, Spain

Abstract

The aim of personalized maps is to help individual users to read maps and focus on the most task-relevant information. Several approaches have been suggested to develop personalized maps for cities, but few consider the spatial knowledge of its users. We propose the design of “cognitively-aware” personalized maps, which take into account the previous experience of users in the city and how the urban space is configured in their minds. Our aim is to facilitate users’ mental links between maps and city places, stimulating users to recall features of the urban space and to assimilate new spatial knowledge. To achieve this goal, we propose the personalization of maps through a map design process based on user modeling and on inferring personalization guidelines from hand-drawn sketches of urban spaces. We applied this process in an experiment with tourists in Madrid, Spain. We categorized the participants into three types of tourists—“Guided”, “Explorer”, and “Conditioned”—according to individual and contextual factors that can influence their spatial knowledge of the city. We also extracted design guidelines from tourists’ sketches and developed map prototypes. The empirical results seem to be promising for developing personalized city maps that could be produced on-the-fly in the future.

A Systematic Review into Factors Influencing Sketch Map Quality

“…Studies count the frequency of objects within pre-set categories. The most frequent sorting method involves categorisation based on geometrical shapes [10,[70][71][72] or on the thematic classification of objects [9,73]. Some studies consider only the overall frequency of the drawn objects [74][75][76].…”

“…The limit values for the criteria are data-driven, following the general recommendation (stated in [81]) of analysing at least five studies to identify the influence of the given factor (variable). When setting the limit value, possible values (5,7,10,15) were validated by statistical analysis (evaluation of data distribution) with the aim of high discrimination and reliability of the results. The limit value of five studies yielded the discrimination of about 30% (portion of factors meeting the requirement), while the other possible limit values considerably lowered the numbers of "proven" factors.…”

“…The aforementioned alternative perspectives, among others, allow different ways of collecting and evaluating data about mental maps. If we want to recall spatial information from memory, we can use various methods, such as sketching a map [7][8][9][10], modelling the Earth's surface [11] or interviewing [12][13][14][15] (see more in [2]). The sketch map method allows an individual's mental map to be understood more completely (in contrast to other methods), because it also allows for a metric evaluation of the quality of the spatial relations between objects [16].…”

Temporal-spatial Analysis of Contributors’ Mapping Behavior for Building Data in OpenStreetMap

“…Meanwhile, roles are played differently by contributors in relation to their locations. During crisis, contributors with great updates are not local to affected regions, while local contributors aim at providing local knowledge (Poiani, et al, 2016), and contributors personalize their mapping activity under different local knowledge (Manrique-Sancho, et al, 2018). These studies show how contributors' mapping behaviors change in both temporal and spatial scales, but they do not answer the question of how their contributions are influencing OSM database quality.…”

Place versus Space: From Points, Lines and Polygons in GIS to Place-Based Representations Reflecting Language and Culture

“…We may, therefore, ask why all the developments mentioned in this article and many others have not led to implementations of place concepts in GIS-at least not beyond some prototypical examples at universities. There are several potential reasons, including technical challenges, ambiguities between different versions, e.g., an English and a Spanish version of the same software, etc., but an obvious-still speculative-explanation could be that it is not commercially relevant, although some studies indicate future applications such as "cognitively-aware" personalised city maps [106]. Future research needs to systematically investigate these limitations and the most recent technical developments regarding their potential to contribute to a place-based GIS that accounts for language, culture, personal, and perhaps emotional settings.…”