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

A graph representation for verbal indoor route descriptions

Verbal indoor route descriptions contain human spatial knowledge that this paper aims to represent formally for further analysis and question-answering. Available tools - route graphs for route descriptions, and place graphs for place descriptions - both turn out to fall short on our corpus of verbal indoor route descriptions. Hence, the paper will identify the characteristics of indoor route descriptions, identify strategies for knowledge extraction, and seek a unified graph representation