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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Tutorial Report: Understanding Spatial Thought Through Language Use, Thora Tenbrink, Tommaso D'Odorico, Christoph Hertzberg, Güzin Mazman, Chiara Meneghetti, Nina Reshöft, Jinlong Yang Dec 2012

Tutorial Report: Understanding Spatial Thought Through Language Use, Thora Tenbrink, Tommaso D'Odorico, Christoph Hertzberg, Güzin Mazman, Chiara Meneghetti, Nina Reshöft, Jinlong Yang

Journal of Spatial Information Science

The tutorial "Understanding spatial thought through language use" took place at the International Spatial Cognition Conference on August 31, 2012 at Kloster Seeon in Germany. This report outlines the main rationale for the tutorial along with central contributions by its participants, who considerably enhanced the success of the tutorial by sharing and discussing their own research experiences with respect to the analysis of language in spatial cognition contexts. The tutorial's website is http://knirb.net/TutorialSC2012.html.


Geospatial Images In The Acquisition Of Spatial Knowledge For Wayfinding, Pyry Kettunen, Katja Irvankoski, Christina M. Krause, Tapani Sarjakoski, L. Tiina Sarjakoski Dec 2012

Geospatial Images In The Acquisition Of Spatial Knowledge For Wayfinding, Pyry Kettunen, Katja Irvankoski, Christina M. Krause, Tapani Sarjakoski, L. Tiina Sarjakoski

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Geospatial images such as maps and aerial photographs are important sources of spatial knowledge that people use for wayfinding. The rapid development of geodata acquisition and digital graphics has recently led to rather complete geographic coverage of both traditional and novel types of geospatial images. Divergent types of geospatial images vary in their support of human acquisition of spatial knowledge. However evaluative studies about the acquisition of spatial knowledge from the diversity of geospatial images have been rare. In this article we review a variety of literature about the acquisition of spatial knowledge while paying particular attention to the role …


The Influence Of Landscape Variation On Landform Categorization, Maia Williams, Werner Kuhn, Marco Painho Dec 2012

The Influence Of Landscape Variation On Landform Categorization, Maia Williams, Werner Kuhn, Marco Painho

Journal of Spatial Information Science

This paper compares the landform vocabularies of residents from two regions in Portugal. Participants described both their own and the other less familiar landscapes in response to video footage of the regions. The results indicate that participants used more detailed vocabularies to describe the known landscape compared to the less familiar study site with detail triggered by individual place recognition. A relationship between landform lexica content and landscape type was observed in the relative placement of detail within each vocabulary. The observed drivers of categorization were the salient features of the landscape (elevation and land cover) and utilitarian motivations (land …


Approaching The Notion Of Place By Contrast, Stephan Winter, Christian Freksa Dec 2012

Approaching The Notion Of Place By Contrast, Stephan Winter, Christian Freksa

Journal of Spatial Information Science

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 …


Spatial Reasoning With Augmented Points: Extending Cardinal Directions With Local Distances, Reinhard Moratz, Jan Oliver Wallgrün Dec 2012

Spatial Reasoning With Augmented Points: Extending Cardinal Directions With Local Distances, Reinhard Moratz, Jan Oliver Wallgrün

Journal of Spatial Information Science

We present an approach for supplying existing qualitative direction calculi with a distance component to support fully fledged positional reasoning. The general underlying idea of augmenting points with local reference properties has already been applied in the OPRAm calculus. In this existing calculus point objects are attached with a local reference direction to obtain oriented points and able to express relative direction using binary relations. We show how this approach can be extended to attach a granular distance concept to direction calculi such as the cardinal direction calculus or adjustable granularity calculi such as OPRAm or the Star calculus. We …


Cybergis - Toward Synergistic Advancement Of Cyberinfrastructure And Giscience: A Workshop Summary, Shaowen Wang, Nancy R. Wilkins-Diehr, Timothy L. Nyerges Oct 2012

Cybergis - Toward Synergistic Advancement Of Cyberinfrastructure And Giscience: A Workshop Summary, Shaowen Wang, Nancy R. Wilkins-Diehr, Timothy L. Nyerges

Journal of Spatial Information Science

This community activity report describes the outcomes of a CyberGIS workshop held in conjunction with the UCGIS 2010 annual winter meeting and sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure. Over the one and one-half day workshop a multidisciplinary group of experts from the international communities of cyberinfrastructure GIScience spatial analysis and modeling and several other related scientific domains were brought together for a participatory meeting composed of both small- and large-group settings and to discuss the CyberGIS road map.


Spatial Models For Context-Aware Indoor Navigation Systems: A Survey, Imad Afyouni, Cyril Ray, Christophe Claramunt Oct 2012

Spatial Models For Context-Aware Indoor Navigation Systems: A Survey, Imad Afyouni, Cyril Ray, Christophe Claramunt

Journal of Spatial Information Science

This paper surveys indoor spatial models developed for research fields ranging from mobile robot mapping to indoor location-based services (LBS) and most recently to context-aware navigation services applied to indoor environments. Over the past few years several studies have evaluated the potential of spatial models for robot navigation and ubiquitous computing. In this paper we take a slightly different perspective considering not only the underlying properties of those spatial models but also to which degree the notion of context can be taken into account when delivering services in indoor environments. Some preliminary recommendations for the development of indoor spatial models …


Computationally Determining The Salience Of Decision Points For Real-Time Wayfinding Support, Makoto Takemiya, Toru Ishikawa Oct 2012

Computationally Determining The Salience Of Decision Points For Real-Time Wayfinding Support, Makoto Takemiya, Toru Ishikawa

Journal of Spatial Information Science

This study introduces the concept of computational salience to explain the discriminatory efficacy of decision points which in turn may have applications to providing real-time assistance to users of navigational aids. This research compared algorithms for calculating the computational salience of decision points and validated the results via three methods: high-salience decision points were used to classify wayfinders; salience scores were used to weight a conditional probabilistic scoring function for real-time wayfinder performance classification; and salience scores were correlated with wayfinding-performance metrics. As an exploratory step to linking computational and cognitive salience a photograph-recognition experiment was conducted. Results reveal a …


Affordance-Based Individuation Of Junctions In Open Street Map, Simon Scheider, Jörg Possin Oct 2012

Affordance-Based Individuation Of Junctions In Open Street Map, Simon Scheider, Jörg Possin

Journal of Spatial Information Science

We propose an algorithm that can be used to identify automatically the subset of street segments of a road network map that corresponds to a junction. The main idea is to use turn-compliant locomotion affordances i.e. restricted patterns of supported movement in order to specify junctions independently of their data representation and in order to motivate tractable individuation and classification strategies. We argue that common approaches based solely on geometry or topology of the street segment graph are useful but insufficient proxies. They miss certain turn restrictions essential to junctions. From a computational viewpoint the main challenge of affordance-based individuation …


Semantic Trajectory Compression: Representing Urban Movement In A Nutshell, Kai-Florian Richter, Falko Schmid, Patrick Laube Oct 2012

Semantic Trajectory Compression: Representing Urban Movement In A Nutshell, Kai-Florian Richter, Falko Schmid, Patrick Laube

Journal of Spatial Information Science

There is an increasing number of rapidly growing repositories capturing the movement of people in space-time. Movement trajectory compression becomes an obvious necessity for coping with such growing data volumes. This paper introduces the concept of semantic trajectory compression (STC). STC allows for substantially compressing trajectory data with acceptable information loss. It exploits that human urban mobility typically occurs in transportation networks that define a geographic context for the movement. In STC a semantic representation of the trajectory that consists of reference points localized in a transportation network replaces raw highly redundant position information (e.g. from GPS receivers). An experimental …


Editorial, Matt Duckham Oct 2012

Editorial, Matt Duckham

Journal of Spatial Information Science

No abstract provided.


A Wayfinding Aid To Increase Navigator Independence, Wilfred Waters, Stephan Winter Oct 2012

A Wayfinding Aid To Increase Navigator Independence, Wilfred Waters, Stephan Winter

Journal of Spatial Information Science

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 …


Geocam: A Geovisual Analytics Workspace To Contextualize And Interpret Statements About Movement, Anuj Jaiswal, Scott Pezanowski, Prasenjit Mitra, Xiao Zhang, Sen Xu, Ian Turton, Alexander Klippel, Alan M. Maceachren Oct 2012

Geocam: A Geovisual Analytics Workspace To Contextualize And Interpret Statements About Movement, Anuj Jaiswal, Scott Pezanowski, Prasenjit Mitra, Xiao Zhang, Sen Xu, Ian Turton, Alexander Klippel, Alan M. Maceachren

Journal of Spatial Information Science

This article focuses on integrating computational and visual methods in a system that supports analysts to identify extract map and relate linguistic accounts of movement. We address two objectives: (1) build the conceptual theoretical and empirical framework needed to represent and interpret human-generated directions; and (2) design and implement a geovisual analytics workspace for direction document analysis. We have built a set of geo-enabled computational methods to identify documents containing movement statements and a visual analytics environment that uses natural language processing methods iteratively with geographic database support to extract interpret and map geographic movement references in context. Additionally analysts …


Segmenting Trajectories: A Framework And Algorithms Using Spatiotemporal Criteria, Maike Buchin, Anne Driemel, Marc Van Kreveld, Vera Sacristan Oct 2012

Segmenting Trajectories: A Framework And Algorithms Using Spatiotemporal Criteria, Maike Buchin, Anne Driemel, Marc Van Kreveld, Vera Sacristan

Journal of Spatial Information Science

In this paper we address the problem of segmenting a trajectory based on spatiotemporal criteria. We require that each segment is homogeneous in the sense that a set of spatiotemporal criteria are fulfilled. We define different such criteria including location heading speed velocity curvature sinuosity curviness and shape. We present an algorithmic framework that allows us to segment any trajectory into a minimum number of segments under any of these criteria or any combination of these criteria. In this framework a segmentation can generally be computed in O(n log n) time where n is the number of edges of the …


Connect The Dot: Computing Feed-Links For Network Extension, Boris Aronov, Kevin Buchin, Maike Buchin, Bart Jansen, Tom De Jong, Marc Van Kreveld, Maarten Loffler, Jun Luo, Rodrigo I. Silveira, Bettina Speckmann Oct 2012

Connect The Dot: Computing Feed-Links For Network Extension, Boris Aronov, Kevin Buchin, Maike Buchin, Bart Jansen, Tom De Jong, Marc Van Kreveld, Maarten Loffler, Jun Luo, Rodrigo I. Silveira, Bettina Speckmann

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Road network analysis can require distance from points that are not on the network themselves. We study the algorithmic problem of connecting a point inside a face (region) of the road network to its boundary while minimizing the detour factor of that point to any point on the boundary of the face. We show that the optimal single connection (feed-link) can be computed in O(lambda_7(n) log n) time where n is the number of vertices that bounds the face and lambda_7(n) is the slightly superlinear maximum length of a Davenport-Schinzel sequence of order 7 on n symbols. We also present …


Editorial, Jörg-Rüdiger Sack Oct 2012

Editorial, Jörg-Rüdiger Sack

Journal of Spatial Information Science

No abstract provided.


Report On The First Workshop On Movement Pattern Analysis Mpa10, Patrick Olivier Laube, Björn Gottfried, Alexander Klippel, Roland Billen, Nico Van De Weghe Oct 2012

Report On The First Workshop On Movement Pattern Analysis Mpa10, Patrick Olivier Laube, Björn Gottfried, Alexander Klippel, Roland Billen, Nico Van De Weghe

Journal of Spatial Information Science

This paper reports on the 1st Workshop on Movement Pattern Analysis, held as a pre-GIScience 2010 workshop in September 2010 in Zurich, Switzerland. The report outlines the scientific motivation for the event, summarizes its main contributions and outcomes, discusses the implications of the gathering, and indicates directions for the road ahead.


Towards A Computational Transportation Science, Stephan Winter, Monika Sester, Ouri Wolfson, Glenn Geers Oct 2012

Towards A Computational Transportation Science, Stephan Winter, Monika Sester, Ouri Wolfson, Glenn Geers

Journal of Spatial Information Science

This report of a community activity a Dagstuhl Seminar earlier in 2010 postulates the need for a computational transportation science as the science behind intelligent transportation systems. In addition to the argument for establishing a discipline we present a first research agenda for computational transportation science.


Uncertainty-Aware Video Visual Analytics Of Tracked Moving Objects, Markus Höferlin, Benjamin Höferlin, Daniel Weiskopf, Gunther Heidemann Oct 2012

Uncertainty-Aware Video Visual Analytics Of Tracked Moving Objects, Markus Höferlin, Benjamin Höferlin, Daniel Weiskopf, Gunther Heidemann

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Vast amounts of video data render manual video analysis useless while recent automatic video analytics techniques suffer from insufficient performance. To alleviate these issues we present a scalable and reliable approach exploiting the visual analytics methodology. This involves the user in the iterative process of exploration hypotheses generation and their verification. Scalability is achieved by interactive filter definitions on trajectory features extracted by the automatic computer vision stage. We establish the interface between user and machine adopting the VideoPerpetuoGram (VPG) for visualization and enable users to provide filter-based relevance feedback. Additionally users are supported in deriving hypotheses by context-sensitive statistical …


Behavior Monitoring And Interpretation, Björn Gottfried Oct 2012

Behavior Monitoring And Interpretation, Björn Gottfried

Journal of Spatial Information Science

No abstract provided.


A Combined Gis And Stereo Vision Approach To Identify Building Pixels In Images And Determine Appropriate Color Terms, Philip James Bartie, Femke Reitsma, Steven Mills Oct 2012

A Combined Gis And Stereo Vision Approach To Identify Building Pixels In Images And Determine Appropriate Color Terms, Philip James Bartie, Femke Reitsma, Steven Mills

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Color information is a useful attribute to include in a building's description to assist the listener in identifying the intended target. Often this information is only available as image data and not readily accessible for use in constructing referring expressions for verbal communication. The method presented uses a GIS building polygon layer in conjunction with street-level captured imagery to provide a method to automatically filter foreground objects and select pixels which correspond to building facades. These selected pixels are then used to define the most appropriate color term for the building and corresponding fuzzy color term histogram. The technique uses …


The Semantics Of Similarity In Geographic Information Retrieval, Krzysztof Janowicz, Martin Raubal, Werner Kuhn Oct 2012

The Semantics Of Similarity In Geographic Information Retrieval, Krzysztof Janowicz, Martin Raubal, Werner Kuhn

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Similarity measures have a long tradition in fields such as information retrieval artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Within the last years these measures have been extended and reused to measure semantic similarity; i.e. for comparing meanings rather than syntactic differences. Various measures for spatial applications have been developed but a solid foundation for answering what they measure; how they are best applied in information retrieval; which role contextual information plays; and how similarity values or rankings should be interpreted is still missing. It is therefore difficult to decide which measure should be used for a particular application or to compare …


Optimizing Map Labeling Of Point Features Based On An Onion Peeling Approach, Wan D. Bae, Shayma Alkobaisi, Sada Narayanappa, Petr Vojtechovsky, Kye Y. Bae Oct 2012

Optimizing Map Labeling Of Point Features Based On An Onion Peeling Approach, Wan D. Bae, Shayma Alkobaisi, Sada Narayanappa, Petr Vojtechovsky, Kye Y. Bae

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Map labeling of point features is the problem of placing text labels to corresponding point features on a map in a way that minimizes overlaps while satisfying basic rules for the quality. This is a critical problem in the application of cartography and geographical information systems (GIS). In this paper we study the fundamental issues related to map labeling of point features and develop a new genetic algorithm to solve this problem. We adopt a method called convex onion peeling and utilize it in our proposed convex onion peeling genetic algorithm (COPGA) to efficiently manage map labels of point features. …


Editorial, Matt Duckham Oct 2012

Editorial, Matt Duckham

Journal of Spatial Information Science

No abstract provided.


Spatial Behavior And Linguistic Representation: Collaborative Interdisciplinary Specialized Workshop, Thora Tenbrink, Jan Wiener, Christophe Claramunt, Marios Avraamides, Rainer Malaka, Hanspeter A. Mallot Oct 2012

Spatial Behavior And Linguistic Representation: Collaborative Interdisciplinary Specialized Workshop, Thora Tenbrink, Jan Wiener, Christophe Claramunt, Marios Avraamides, Rainer Malaka, Hanspeter A. Mallot

Journal of Spatial Information Science

The Collaborative Interdisciplinary Specialized Workshop on Spatial Behavior and Linguistic Representation took place on April 23–24, 2010, at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, Institute for Advanced Study (HWK), in Delmenhorst, Germany. We report the scientific motivation for this workshop and report its outcomes together with the impact of a gathering of this kind for the scientific community.


Grain Levels In English Path Curvature Descriptions And Accompanying Iconic Gestures, Emile Van Der Zee, Urpo Nikanne, Uta Sassenberg Oct 2012

Grain Levels In English Path Curvature Descriptions And Accompanying Iconic Gestures, Emile Van Der Zee, Urpo Nikanne, Uta Sassenberg

Journal of Spatial Information Science

This paper confirms that the English verb system (similar to the Finnish, Dutch, and Bulgarian verb systems) represents path curvature at three different grain levels: neutral path curvature, global path curvature, and local path curvature. We show that the three-grain-level hypothesis makes it possible to formulate constraints on English sentence structure and makes it possible to define constructions in English that refer to path curvature. We furthermore demonstrate in an experiment that the proposed English lexicalization pattern regarding path curvature in tandem with the spatial information shown to English speakers correctly predicts their packaging of grain levels in iconic gestures. …


Linguistic Spatial Classifications Of Event Domains In Narratives Of Crime, Blake Stephen Howald Oct 2012

Linguistic Spatial Classifications Of Event Domains In Narratives Of Crime, Blake Stephen Howald

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Structurally, formal definitions of the linguistic narrative minimally require two temporally linked past-time events. The role of space in this definition, based on spatial language indicating where events occur, is considered optional and non-structural. However, based on narratives with a high frequency of spatial language, recent research has questioned this perspective, suggesting that space is more critical than may be readily apparent. Through an analysis of spatially rich serial criminal narratives, it will be demonstrated that spatial information qualitatively varies relative to narrative events. In particular, statistical classifiers in a supervised machine learning task achieve a 90% accuracy in predicting …


This Is The Tricky Part: When Directions Become Difficult, Stephen Hirtle, Kai-Florian Richter, Samvith Srinivas, Robert Firth Oct 2012

This Is The Tricky Part: When Directions Become Difficult, Stephen Hirtle, Kai-Florian Richter, Samvith Srinivas, Robert Firth

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Automated route guidance systems, both web-based systems and en-route systems, have become commonplace in recent years. These systems often replace human-generated directions, which are often incomplete, vague, or in error. However, human-generated directions have the ability to differentiate between easy and complex steps through language in a way that is more difficult in automated systems. This article examines a set of human-generated verbal directions to better understand why some parts of directions are perceived as being more difficult than the remaining steps. Insights from this analysis will lead to recommendations to improve the next generation of automated route guidance systems.


Presenting Spatial Information: Granularity, Relevance, And Integration, Thora Tenbrink, Stephan Winter Oct 2012

Presenting Spatial Information: Granularity, Relevance, And Integration, Thora Tenbrink, Stephan Winter

Journal of Spatial Information Science

No abstract provided.


Exploring Place Through User-Generated Content: Using Flickr Tags To Describe City Cores, Livia Hollenstein, Ross Purves Oct 2012

Exploring Place Through User-Generated Content: Using Flickr Tags To Describe City Cores, Livia Hollenstein, Ross Purves

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Terms used to describe city centers, such as Downtown, are key concepts in everyday or vernacular language. Here, we explore such language by harvesting georeferenced and tagged metadata associated with 8 million Flickr images and thus consider how large numbers of people name city core areas. The nature of errors and imprecision in tagging and georeferencing are quantified, and automatically generated precision measures appear to mirror errors in the positioning of images. Users seek to ascribe appropriate semantics to images, though bulk-uploading and bulk-tagging may introduce bias. Between 0.5--2% of tags associated with georeferenced images analyzed describe city core areas …