Wayfinding and navigation research for sustainable transport

Spatial information science contributes to the foundations of sustainable transport development. This article focuses especially on the role that research on human wayfinding and navigation plays when it comes to designing digital connectivity and autonomy in urban transport

Social Media Users\u27 Guide

Mass Communication Professor Susan Currie Sivek shares ideas and suggestions for how to take control of social media and use it to your advantage

Virtual Decoupling for IT/Business Alignment - Conceptual Foundations, Architecture Design and Implementation Example

IT/business alignment is one of the main topics of information systems research. If IT artifacts and business-related artifacts are coupled point-to-point, however, complex architectures become unmanageable over time. In computer science, concepts like the ANSI/SPARC three-level database architecture propose an architecture layer which decouples external views on data and the implementation view of data. In this paper, a similar approach for IT/business alignment is proposed. The proposed alignment architecture is populated by enterprise services as elementary artifacts. Enterprise services link software components and process activities. They are aggregated into applications and subsequently into domains for planning/design and communication purposes. Most design approaches for the construction of enterprise services, applications and domains are top-down, i.e. they decompose complex artifacts on a stepwise basis. As an alternative which takes into account coupling semantics, we propose a bottom-up approach which is demonstrated for the identification of domains. Our approach is evaluated using a telecommunications equipment case stud

Interpreting Place Descriptions for Navigation Services

We see a need for research bringing spatial intelligence into the fundamental mechanisms of parsing and interpreting place descriptions. An intelligent navigation service will have capabilities to imitate human route communication behavior (Winter and Wu, 2009), thus, at least the capabilities to make sense of place descriptions

A wayfinding aid to increase navigator independence

Wayfinding aids are of great benefit because users do not have to rely on their learned geographic knowledge or orientation skills alone for successful navigation. Additionally cognitive resources usually captured by this activity can be spent elsewhere. A challenge however remains for wayfinding aid developers. Due to the automation of wayfinding aids navigator independence may be decreasing via the use of these aids. In order to address this wayfinding aids might be improved additionally to perform a training role. Since the most versatile wayfinders appear to deploy a dual strategy for geographic orientation it is proposed that wayfinding aids be improved to foster such an approach. This paper presents the results of an experimental study testing a portion of the suggested enhancement

Approaching the notion of place by contrast

Place is an elusive notion in geographic information science. This paper presents an approach to capture the notion of place by contrast. This approach is developed from cognitive concepts and the language that is used to describe places. It is complementary to those of coordinate-based systems that dominate contemporary geographic information systems. Accordingly the approach is aimed at explaining structures in verbal place descriptions and at localizing objects without committing to geometrically specified positions in space. We will demonstrate how locations can be identified by place names that are not crisply defined in terms of geometric regions. Capturing the human cognitive notion of place is considered crucial for smooth communication between human users and computer-based geographic assistance systems

A context-sensitive conceptual framework for activity modeling

Human motion trajectories, however captured, provide a rich spatiotemporal data source for human activity recognition, and the rich literature in motion trajectory analysis provides the tools to bridge the gap between this data and its semantic interpretation. But activity is an ambiguous term across research communities. For example, in urban transport research activities are generally characterized around certain locations assuming the opportunities and resources are present in that location, and traveling happens between these locations for activity participation, i.e., travel is not an activity, rather a mean to overcome spatial constraints. In contrast, in human-computer interaction (HCI) research and in computer vision research activities taking place along the way, such as reading on the bus, are significant for contextualized service provision. Similarly activities at coarser spatial and temporal granularity, e.g., holidaying in a country, could be recognized in some context or domain. Thus the context prevalent in the literature does not provide a precise and consistent definition of activity, in particular in differentiation to travel when it comes to motion trajectory analysis. Hence in this paper, a thorough literature review studies activity from different perspectives, and develop a common framework to model and reason human behavior flexibly across contexts. This spatio-temporal framework is conceptualized with a focus on modeling activities hierarchically. Three case studies will illustrate how the semantics of the term activity changes based on scale and context. They provide evidence that the framework holds over different domains. In turn, the framework will help developing various applications and services that are aware of the broad spectrum of the term activity across contexts