A mobile application for a user-generated collection of landmarks

Landmarks are crucial elements in how people understand and communicate about space. In wayfinding they provide references that are preferred and easier to follow than distances or street names alone. Thus, the inclusion of landmarks into navigation services is a long-held goal, but its implementation has largely failed so far. To a large part this is due to significant difficulties in obtaining a sufficient data set of landmark candidates. In this paper, we introduce a mobile application, which enables a user-generated collection of landmarks. Employing a photo-based interface, the application calculates and ranks potential landmark candidates based on the current visible area and presents them to the user, who then may choose the intended one. We use OpenStreetMap as data source; the app allows tagging OSM objects as potential landmarks. Integrating users into the landmark selection process keeps data requirements low, while a simple interface lowers the burden on the users

Understanding Cognitive Saliency by Using an Online Game

One of the most common definitions of saliency suggests that there are three categories for landmark saliency, these being visual, structural and cognitive [1]. A large number of studies have focused on the afore-mentioned categories; however, there appear to be fewer studies on cognitive saliency than on the other two types of landmark saliency. Hence, in this study, our goal is to better understand the cognitive saliency of potential landmarks. For this purpose, we used an online virtual game, Sea Hero Quest (SHQ), and asked people to watch videos of the game. In the videos, a boat navigates through a waterway/river environment and finds goal locations one by one. People then were asked to answer questions, which aimed to measure their cognitive saliency. Our results suggest that cognitive saliency is closely related to visual and structural saliency in unfamiliar environments