DESTINATION DESCRIPTIONS
IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS
PhD THESIS
Martin Tomko
Submitted in total fulfillment of the requirements
of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
April, 2007
Department of Geomatics
The University of Melbourne
Abstract
An important difference exists between the way humans communicate route knowledge and the turn-by-turn route directions provided by the majority of current navigation services. Navigation services present route directions with the same amount of detail regardless the route segment’s significance in the instructions, user’s distance from the destination, and finally the level of user’s familiarity with particular parts of the environment.
A significant feature of human-generated route directions provided to people is the hierarchical communication of route knowledge. References are made to a simplified structure of the environment. Communication partners exchange route directions assuming a shared knowledge of the coarse environment’s structure. Such destination descriptions provide an increased amount of detail as the description approaches the proximity of the destination of the route.
The research presented in this thesis aims to improve the communication of navigation information by presenting a formal model enabling the selection of references for destination descriptions. The model is based on the analysis of the reflection of the structure of the urban environment in destination descriptions provided by locals. In such spatial communication, common knowledge of the coarse structure of the city is inferred.
The main contribution of this thesis is the analysis of the reflection of the structure of an urban environment in the route directions exchanged between people with at least coarse knowledge of the environment, and the formalization of these principles in a computational model that enables automated selection of referents for destination descriptions. In the approach presented, the environmental elements of the city structure are hierarchically integrated together with a model of the communication processes underlying the creation of destination descriptions .
Automated creation of directions with a variable level of detail will improve the ability to reflect the alteration of local conditions. The resulting route directions are usually shorter than those created by current navigation services, and thus lower the cognitive workload of the wayfinder. The benefactors of such a system are wayfinders frequently traveling to unfamiliar destinations in partially-known urban environments, such as the police, emergency management and tourism services, but also locals—everyday users of Web based navigation portals.
Keywords destination descriptions, wayfinding, pragmatic communication, relevance, spatial knowledge, a-priori spatial knowledge, familiarity
Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1.1 Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1.2 The Familiar Structure of the Environment and Route Directions. . . . . 2
1.1.3 Inferential Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.1.4 Current Approaches to Route Directions’ Personalization . 5
1.2 Scope and Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.3 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.4 Expected Outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.5 Thesis Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2 Background 11
2.1 Experiencing Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.1.1 Mental Representations of Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.1.2 Conceptualization of Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.1.3 Hierarchical Structure of Spatial Mental Representations . 15
2.1.4 Route Planning and Wayfinding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.2 Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.2.1 Communication Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.2.2 The Meaning of Utterances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.2.3 Relevance Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.2.4 Knowledge, Context and Communication . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.2.5 Referential Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2.2.6 Communication about Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.2.7 Directions and Cognitive Ergonomics . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.3 Modeling and Formalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.3.1 Formalization and Functional Programming . . . . . . . . 33
2.3.2 Modeling Complex Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.3.3 Granularity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
2.3.4 Spatial Modeling and Network Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . 36
2.3.5 Basic Measures for Network Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
2.3.6 Basic Elements of the Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3 Destination Descriptions 41
3.1 Scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
3.2 Definition of Destination Descriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
3.3 Structure of Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
3.4 Selection of Referents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3.5 Common Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.6 Characteristics of Destination Descriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
4 Hierarchical Data Structures 55
4.1 Hierarchical Urban Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
4.2 Experiential Hierarchies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
4.3 Composition of the Urban Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
4.4 Hierarchization of Elements of the City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
4.4.1 Hierarchies of Landmarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
4.4.2 Hierarchies of Districts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
4.4.3 Hierarchies of Paths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
4.5 Integrated Experiential Hierarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
4.6 Concept of Distance in Hierarchical Structures . . . . . . . . . . . 82
5 A Generic Model of Destination Descriptions 83
5.1 Context Specifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
5.2 Model Constraints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
5.3 Structure of Destination Descriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
5.4 Relevance of a Reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
5.5 Rules for Selecting District References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
5.6 Rules for Selecting Landmarks References . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
5.7 Rules for Selecting Paths References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
5.8 Integrated Destination Descriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
6 Model Implementation 105
6.1 Data Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
6.2 Input and Output Specification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
6.3 Main Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
6.3.1 Selection of District and Landmark References . . . . . . . 108
6.3.2 Integration of Path References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
6.4 Model Verification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
6.4.1 Test of District and Landmark-Based Destination Descriptions
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
6.4.2 Test of Destination Descriptions with Paths . . . . . . . . 116
6.5 Observations of the Model Outputs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
7 Conclusions 125
7.1 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
7.2 Main Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
7.3 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
7.3.1 Cognitive Workload and Destination Descriptions . . . . . 129
7.3.2 Reliability of Inference of Common Spatial Knowledge . . 131
7.3.3 Experiential Data Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
7.4 Outlook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
7.4.1 Descriptions and Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
7.4.2 The Where? Question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
7.4.3 Externalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
7.4.4 Coupling of Inferential and Agent-Based Systems . . . . . 136
7.4.5 Complex Integrated Experiential Hierarchies . . . . . . . . 136
7.5 Concluding Scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
A Landmark Names 139
B Input Dataset of Hannover 141
C Program Code 151
D Example Test Cases 157
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