Wayfinding Assistance Based on Previous Knowledge

Small displays are currently gaining importance as interfaces for geographic information. More specifically, mobile position aware devices, such as mobile phones equipped with GPS, are increasingly used for mobile wayfinding assistance. But their constrained displays are too small to reproduce conventional maps without an increasing effort for the user. E.g., he has to zoom in and out, and to scroll the map to understand the details and configurationally relationships of the involved entities of a route. This fragmentation of the information is not just inconvenient, but affects the cognitive processing of the given information and lowers the effectiveness of the assistance. One approach to attack this problem is to tailor maps to the individual knowledge of a user. If an assistance system knows about the places and paths a user knows, it can generate maps according to this information: those parts of a route, which the user has good knowledge on, can be displayed with less details and parts with no or little knowledge can be emphasized.

In this branch of our research we developed µMaps, maps that are tailored to the individual previous knowledge of users.

Core Publications in This Area

Falko Schmid, Colin Kuntzsch (2009). In-Situ Communication and Labeling of Places. In Mike Jackson, Suchith Anand, Georg Gartner (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on LBS and TeleCartography. University of Nottingham.

Falko Schmid, Kai-Florian Richter, Patrick Laube (2009).Semantic Trajectory Compression. In N. Mamoulis, T. Seidl, T.B. Pedersen, K Torp, I. Assent (Eds.), Advances in Spatial and Temporal Databases --- 11th International Symposium, SSTD 2009, Vol. 5644, pp. 411–416, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin. Poster Paper.

Falko Schmid (2009). Mental Tectonics - Rendering Consistent µMaps. In Kathleen Stewart Hornsby, Christophe Claramunt, Michel Denis, Gérard Ligozat (Eds.), Spatial Information Theory, 9th International Conference, COSIT 2009, Vol. 5756, pp. 245–262, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Falko Schmid (2009). Enhancing the accessibility of maps with personal frames of reference. In Julie A. Jacko (Ed.), HCI (3): Human-Computer Interaction. Ambient, Ubiquitous and Intelligent Interaction, 13th International Conference, HCI International 2009, San Diego, CA, USA, July 19-24, 2009, Proceedings Part III, Vol. 5612, pp. 199–210, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer.

Falko Schmid (2008). Knowledge based wayfinding maps for small display cartography. In Journal of Location Based Services, 2 (1), pp. 57–83.    Falko Schmid, Kai-Florian Richter (2006).Extracting Places from Location Data Streams. In UbiGIS 2006 - Second International Workshop on Ubiquitous Geographical Information Services. Workshop at GIScience 2006.

Falko Schmid (2007). Personalized Maps for Mobile Wayfinding Assistance. In E. Mok, G. Gartner (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4. Internat. Symposium on Location Based Services & TeleCartography. Department of Land Surveying & Geo-Informatics, HongKong Polytechnic University, HongKong.

Falko Schmid (2007). Formulating, Identifying, and Analyzing Individual Spatial Knowledge. In Seventh IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW 2007), pp. 655–660. IEEE Computer Society,Los Alamitos, CA, USA.