Kai-Florian Richter

An Urban Knowledge Data Structure

Abstract

There are some fundamental differences in how machines and humans communicate about space, which becomes especially apparent in our daily lives when using navigation services. This is to a large part rooted in the differences in spatial representations used by machines and humans.

I will focus on route directions as a specific form of spatial communication. In recent years, several approaches have been developed that contribute to bridging the gap between machine and human communication of these directions. Predominantly, these try to shift from metric distances to references to environmental features (landmarks) in describing actions to be performed. Another line of work investigates how to structure instructions to ease their understanding. Both call for mechanisms that support these operations already on the representational level. In my talk I will illustrate what is required for such representations and present the Urban Knowledge Data Structure (UKDS), which is based on the Open Location Services specification of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). UKDS combines the computational efficiency of a network representation of space with formal specifications of cognitive principles of human direction giving.