. Wayfinding is a basic activity people do throughout their entire lives as they navigate from one place to another. In order to create different spaces in such a way that they facilitate people's wayfinding it is necessary to integrate principles of human spatial cognition into the design process. This paper presents a methodology to structure space based on experiental patterns, called image schemata. It integrates cognitive and engineering aspects in three steps: (1) interviewing people about their spatial experiences as they perform a wayfinding task in the application space, (2) extracting the image schemata from these interviews and formulating a sequence of subtasks, and (3) structuring the application space (i.e., the wayfinding task) with the extracted image schemata. We use wayfinding in airports as a case study to demonstrate the methodology. Our observations show that most often image schemata are correlated with other image schemata in the form of image-schemat...

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The notion of a spatial information theory is often understood in the sense of a theory underlying the design and implementation of geographic information systems (GIS). This paper offers a different perspective on spatial information theories, taking the point of view of people trying to solve spatial problems by using a GIS. It discerns a need for user level theories about spatial information and describes requirements for them. These requirements are then compared with various views on metaphors held in computer science and cognitive linguistics. It is concluded that a cognitive linguistics perspective on metaphors best matches the requirements for user level theories. Therefore, the user's needs for theories of spatial information should be dealt with by explicitly crafting metaphors to handle spatial information by human beings. The paper discusses traditional and possible future metaphor sources for spatial information handling tasks. 1. Introduction The past decade has been ch...

Abstract. We apply the notion of conceptual integration from cognitive science to model the semantics of geographic categories. The paper shows the basic ideas, using the classical integration example of houseboats and boathouses. It extends the notion with image-schematic and affordance-based structure. A formalization in the functional language Haskell tests this approach and demonstrates how it generalizes to a powerful paradigm for building ontologies. 1.

. Metaphors have found their way into the theory and practice of user interface design, but there remain many specific questions about the extent and methodology of their use. This paper discusses some of these questions in the context of user interfaces for Geographic Information Systems (GIS). It is structured as a list of 7±2 questions and answers, where the "+" applies to questions and the "-" to answers, reflecting the fact that there are many questions without or with only tentative answers yet. The questions address the issues of metaphor definition, metaphor vs. magic, generating metaphor candidates, metaphor selection, design methodology, metaphor combination, cross-cultural use, extent of use, and overall justification for metaphors. The question and answer pairs are illustrated by examples from the domain of GIS. 1. What Are User Interface Metaphors? A metaphor allows us to understand one thing in terms of another. For example, the metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY lets us think ...

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Wayfinding is a basic activity that people do throughout their entire lives as they navigate from one place to another. Many theories of spatial cognition have been developed to account for this behavior; however, most of the computational models focus on knowledge representation (e.g., cognitive maps) and do not consider the process of how people structure wayfinding tasks and space. This paper presents a computational method to compare the complexity of wayfinding tasks in built environments. As a measure for such complexity we use a simple wayfinding model that consists of two critical elements: choices and clues. We show that elements of people's perception and cognition can be used to determine the elements of the wayfinding model and, therefore, to compare the complexity of wayfinding tasks in built environments. A case study of wayfinding in airports demonstrates the applicability of the method. The integration of this method into the computational design process of built enviro...

Metaphors are powerful means to design and learn user interfaces for computer systems. This paper discusses metaphors for display operations in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Specifically, the metaphor DISPLAYS ARE VIEWS is proposed and analyzed. It is presented as an antithesis to the metaphor DISPLAYS ARE MAPS, which is consciously or unconsciously adopted by designers and users of most GIS interfaces. Displays are understood here as graphic screen presentations of geographic space, maps as static (paper) maps and views as visual fields, containing what humans see in a given situation. The major advantage of the visual field as a metaphor source is that it naturally accommodates scale changes. Thus, analyzing its structure also sheds new light on the generalization problem for displays. 1. Introduction 1 Kuhn, W. 1991. "Are Displays Maps or Views?". In Proceedings of ACSM-ASPRS AutoCarto 10, in Baltimore, Maryland, Published by American Congress on Surveying and Mapping, Vol...

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The human-computer interface is a crucial element in the design of the next generation of Geographic Information Systems (GISs). We discuss the user interface design process by separating the formalization of the problem domain (identifying the objects a user manipulates, and their pertinent operations) from its visualization (describing human-computer interaction techniques such as windows and dialog boxes). This framework is used to examine the process of manipulating attribute data in a GIS on the basis of the common cartographic concept of a categorical coverage. The characteristics of categorical coverage data and the user requirements for interacting with this data are formalized in the form of a set of fundamental objects and operations. A visualization for a windows-icons-menus-pointing devices (WIMP) interface is presented.