Structural Salience of Landmarks for Route Directions

This paper complements landmark research with an approach to formalize the structural salience of objects along routes. The aim is to automatically integrate salient objects—landmarks—into route directions. To this end, two directions of research are combined: the formalization of salience of objects and the conceptualization of wayfinding actions. We approach structural salience with some taxonomic considerations of point-like objects with respect to their positions along a route and detail the effects of different positions on the conceptualization process. The results are used to extend a formal language of route knowledge, the wayfinding choreme theory. This research contributes to a cognitive foundation for next generation navigation support and to the aim of formalizing geosemantics.