A Uniform Handling of Different Landmark Types in Route Directions

Landmarks are crucial for human wayfinding. Their integration in wayfinding assistance systems is essential for generating cognitively ergonomic route directions. I present an approach to automatically determining references to different types of landmarks. This approach exploits the circular order of a decision point’s branches. It allows uniformly handling point landmarks as well as linear and areal landmarks; these may be functionally relevant for a single decision point or a sequence of decision points. The approach is simple, yet powerful and can handle different spatial situations. It is an integral part of Guard, a process generating context-specific route directions that adapts wayfinding instructions to a route’s properties and environmental characteristics. Guard accounts for cognitive principles of good route directions; the resulting route directions reflect people’s conceptualization of route information.