Retrieving Landmark Salience Based on Wikipedia: An Integrated Ranking Model

Landmarks are important for assisting in wayfinding and navigation and for enriching user experience. Although many user-generated geotagged sources exist, landmark entities are still mostly retrieved from authoritative geographic sources. Wikipedia, the world’s largest free encyclopedia, stores geotagged information on many geospatial entities, including a very large and well-founded volume of landmark information. However, not all Wikipedia geotagged landmark entities can be considered valuable and instructive. This research introduces an integrated ranking model for mining landmarks from Wikipedia predicated on estimating and weighting their salience. Other than location, the model is based on the entries’ category and attributed data. Preliminary ranking is formulated on the basis of three spatial descriptors associated with landmark salience, namely permanence, visibility, and uniqueness. This ranking is integrated with a score derived from a set of numerical attributes that are associated with public interest in the Wikipedia page―including the number of redirects and the date of the latest edit. The methodology is comparatively evaluated for various areas in different cities. Results show that the developed integrated ranking model is robust in identifying landmark salience, paving the way for incorporation of Wikipedia’s content into navigation systems

Infectious Fear: The Rhetoric of Pestilence in Middle English Didactic Texts on Death

This article examines literary references to bubonic plague in a sample of late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English texts that are didactic in tone and address the theme of death, including Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale”, John Lydgate’s “Danse Macabre” and the anonymous The Castle of Perseverance and “A Disputation between the Body and Worms”. Although there have been broad surveys of bubonic plague in Middle English literature, as well as studies of isolated texts, this article is the first to examine the role of pestilence in a group of texts linked by theme and authorial intention. It contributes to current understanding of the disease in late medieval literature and culture, showing how authors utilised the idea of pestilence as a frightening cause of sudden death and as a form of rhetoric serving to encourage readers to reflect on mortality, the spiritual health of the soul and the prospect of salvation. Whereas previous research has shown that doctors, priests and writers interpreted the pestilence as a divine punishment for sin, this study demonstrates how that belief could be exploited for rhetorical purposes. The rhetoric of pestilence emerges as a powerful contemplative tool urging readers to practise self-examination, penitence and a more active, strategic approach to death

The Smiling Abbot: Rediscovering a Unique Medieval Effigial Slab

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Archaeological Journal on 06/11/2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00665983.2017.1366705The article reports on a newly re-discovered fragment of a recumbent effigial slab commemorating Abbot Hywel (‘Howel’), most likely an abbot of the Cistercian house of Valle Crucis, near Llangollen (Denbighs.). The slab was probably carved very early in the fourteenth century, and could have covered the abbot’s burial place. The stone was dislocated and fragmented at an unknown point in the abbey’s history, and most likely removed from the site during the nineteenth-century clearance of the abbey ruins. It was briefly reported on in 1895 and has been lost to scholarship subsequently. If indeed from Valle Crucis, the stone is the only known effigial slab commemorating a Cistercian abbot from Wales, and a rare example from Britain. Given that few similar Cistercian abbatial monuments have been identified from elsewhere, the ‘Smiling Abbot’, although only a fragment, is a significant addition to the known corpus of later medieval mortuary monuments. The article discusses the provenance, dating, identification and significance of the monument, including the abbot’s distinctive smile. The stone sheds new light on mortuary and commemorative practice at Valle Crucis Abbey in the early fourteenth century

The English medieval first-floor hall: part 2 – The evidence from the eleventh to early thirteenth century

The concept of the first-floor hall was introduced in 1935, but Blair’s paper of 1993 cast doubt on many of those buildings which had been identified as such. Following the recognition of Scolland’s Hall, Richmond Castle as an example of a hall at first-floor level, the evidence for buildings of this type is reviewed (excluding town houses and halls in the great towers of castles, where other issues apply). While undoubtedly a number of buildings have been mistakenly identified as halls, there is a significant group of structures which there are very strong grounds to classify as first-floor halls. The growth of masonry architecture in elite secular buildings, particularly after the Norman Conquest, allowed halls to be constructed on the first floor. The key features of these are identified and the reasons for constructing the hall at this level – prestige and security – are recognized. The study of these buildings allows two further modifications to the Blair thesis: in some houses, halls and chambers were integrated in a single block at an early date, and the basic idea of the medieval domestic plan was already present by the late eleventh century

WIKIPEDIA ENTRIES AS A SOURCE OF CAR NAVIGATION LANDMARKS

Car navigation system devices provide today with an easy and simple solution to the basic concept of reaching a destination. Although these systems usually achieve this goal, they still deliver a limited and poor sequence of instructions that do not consider the human nature of using landmarks during wayfinding. This research paper addresses the concept of enriching navigation route instructions by adding supplementary route information in the form of landmarks. We aim at using a contributed source of landmarks information, which is easy to access, available, show high update rate, and have a large scale of information. For this, Wikipedia was chosen, since it represents the world’s largest free encyclopaedia that includes information about many spatial entities. A survey and classification of available landmarks is implemented, coupled with ranking algorithms based on the entries’ categories and attributes. These are aimed at retrieving the most relevant landmark information required that are valuable for the enrichment of a specific navigation route. The paper will present this methodology, together with examples and results, showing the feasibility of using this concept and its potential of enriching navigation processes