8 research outputs found
What spatial environments mean
Language is one of the most prominent means of representing human thought. Spatial cognition research has made use of this fact for decades, exploring how humans perceive and understand their spatial environments through language analysis. So far, this research has mainly focused on generic cognitive aspects underlying everyday purposes such as knowing where objects are, how they relate to each other, and how to find one\u27s way to a familiar or unfamiliar location. However, human concepts about space can be threatened by change, as the environment changes. Across the globe, people become increasingly aware of climate-change related threats to their surroundings. For spatial language research, this calls for a fundamental shift in focus, towards the ways in which humans relate to space meaningfully--what spatial environments mean to us, how we respond to them and how we cope with changes and threats to our habitual space. This paper lays out how linguistic research can support building resilience on the basis of meaningful relationships to spatial environments
Where Snow is a Landmark: Route Direction Elements in Alpine Contexts
Route directions research has mostly focused on urban space so far, highlighting human concepts of street networks based on a range of recurring elements such as route segments, decision points, landmarks and actions. We explored the way route directions reflect the features of space and activity in the context of mountaineering. Alpine route directions are only rarely segmented through decision points related to reorientation; instead, segmentation is based on changing topography. Segments are described with various degrees of detail, depending on difficulty. For landmark description, direction givers refer to properties such as type of surface, dimension, colour of landscape features; terrain properties (such as snow) can also serve as landmarks. Action descriptions reflect the geometrical conceptualization of landscape features and dimensionality of space. Further, they are very rich in the semantics of manner of motion
Juegos educativos móviles: aspectos involucrados
Los Juegos Educativos Móviles son creados con objetivos educativos y se emplean como una herramienta en el proceso de aprendizaje por considerarse un elemento motivador para los alumnos. En este trabajo se presentan tres aspectos de este tipo de juegos: el contenido, la movilidad y la presentación (que se le brinda al alumno de los dos aspectos anteriores). El objetivo de este trabajo, es presentar estos aspectos de manera desacoplada entre sí, para poderlos combinar, al momento de la creación de estos juegos, fomentando de este modo, el reuso de cada aspecto.XI Workshop tecnología informática aplicada en educaciónRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI
Introduction to the second international symposium of platial information science
People ‘live’ and constitute places every day through recurrent practices and experience. Our everyday lives, however, are complex, and so are places. In contrast to abstract space, the way people experience places includes a range of aspects like physical setting, meaning, and emotional attachment. This inherent complexity requires researchers to investigate the concept of place from a variety of viewpoints. The formal representation of place – a major goal in GIScience related to place – is no exception and can only be successfully addressed if we consider geographical, psychological, anthropological, sociological, cognitive, and other perspectives. This year’s symposium brings together place-based researchers from different disciplines to discuss the current state of platial research. Therefore, this volume contains contributions from a range of fields including geography, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and cartography
Simulated cognitive topologies: automatically generating highly contextual maps for complex journeys
As people traverse complex journeys, they engage in a number of information
interactions across spatial scales and levels of abstraction. Journey complexity
is characterised by factors including the number of actions required, and by
variation in the contextual basis of reasoning such as a transition between
different modes of transport. The high-level task of an A to B journey
decomposes into a sequence of lower-level navigational sub-tasks, with the
representation of geographic entities that support navigation during, between
and across sub-tasks, varying relative to the nature of the task and the
character of the geography. For example, transitioning from or to a particular
mode of transport has a direct bearing on the natural level of representational
abstraction that supports the task, as well as on the overall extent of the task’s
region of influence on the traveller’s focus. Modern mobile technologies send
data to a device that can in theory be context-specific in terms of explicitly
reflecting a traveller’s heterogeneous information requirements, however the
extent to which context is explicitly reflected in the selection and display of
navigational information remains limited in practice, with a rigid, predetermined scale-based hierarchy of cartographic views remaining the
underlying representational paradigm.
The core subject of the research is the context-dependent selection and display
of navigational information, and while there are many and varied
considerations in developing techniques to address selection and display, the
central challenge can simply be articulated as how to determine the
probability, given the traveller’s current context, that a feature should be in
the current map view. Clearly this central challenge extends to all features in
the spatial extent, and so from a practical perspective, research questions
centre around the initial selection of a subset of features, and around
determining an overall probability distribution over the subset given the
significance of features within the hierarchically ordered sequence of tasks.
In this thesis research is presented around the use of graph structures as a
practical basis for modeling urban geography to support heterogenous selections across viewing scales, and ultimately for displaying highly context-specific cartographic views. Through an iterative, empirical research
methodology, a formalised approach based on routing networks is presented,
which serves as the basis for modeling, selection and display.
Findings are presented from a series of 7 situated navigation studies that
included research with an existing navigation application as well as
experimental research stimuli. Hypotheses were validated and refined over the
course of the studies, with a focus on journey-specific regions that form around
the navigable network. Empirical data includes sketch maps, textual
descriptions, video and device interactions over the course of complex
navigation exercises. Study findings support the proposed graph architecture,
including subgraph classes that approximate cognitive structures central to
natural comprehension and reasoning. Empirical findings lead to the central
argument of a model based on causal mechanisms, in which relations are
formalised between task, selection and abstraction.
A causal framework for automatically determining map content for a given
journey context is presented, with the approach involving a conceptual shift
from treating geographic features as spatially indexed records, to treating them
as variables with a finite number of possible states. Causal nets serve as the
practical basis of reasoning, with geographic features being represented by
variables in these causal structures. The central challenge of finding the
probability that a variable in a causal net is in a particular state is addressed
through a causal model in which journey context serves as the evidence that
propagates over the net. In this way, complex heterogeneous selections for
interactive multi-scale information spaces are expressed as probability
distributions determined through message propagation.
The thesis concludes with a discussion around the implications of the approach
for the presentation of navigational information, and it is shown how the
framework can support context-specific selection and disambiguation of map
content, demonstrated through the central use case of navigating complex
urban journeys