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Where Snow is a Landmark: Route Direction Elements in Alpine Contexts

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Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9368))

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Abstract

Route directions research has mostly focused on urban space so far, highlighting human concepts of street networks based on a range of recurring elements such as route segments, decision points, landmarks and actions. We explored the way route directions reflect the features of space and activity in the context of mountaineering. Alpine route directions are only rarely segmented through decision points related to reorientation; instead, segmentation is based on changing topography. Segments are described with various degrees of detail, depending on difficulty. For landmark description, direction givers refer to properties such as type of surface, dimension, colour of landscape features; terrain properties (such as snow) can also serve as landmarks. Action descriptions reflect the geometrical conceptualization of landscape features and dimensionality of space. Further, they are very rich in the semantics of manner of motion.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.alpinejournal.org.uk/.

  2. 2.

    http://textberg.ch.

  3. 3.

    https://www.facebook.com/summitpost.org/info?tab=page_info.

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Acknowledgements

Ekaterina Egorova is thankful for the support of the University Research Priority Programme “Language and Space” of the University of Zurich.

We would like to thank all four referees of this paper for their constructive and useful pointers which helped improve the final version of this work.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Ekaterina Egorova & Ross S. Purves

  2. University Priority Research Programme Language and Space (URPP SpuR), University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Ekaterina Egorova

  3. School of Linguistics and English Language, Bangor University, Bangor, UK

    Thora Tenbrink

Authors
  1. Ekaterina Egorova
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  2. Thora Tenbrink
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  3. Ross S. Purves
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Correspondence to Ekaterina Egorova .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Sara Irina Fabrikant

  2. ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Martin Raubal

  3. School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Michela Bertolotto

  4. University of Winchester, Winchester, United Kingdom

    Clare Davies

  5. Dept. of Geography and Env. Studies, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA

    Scott Freundschuh

  6. College of Arts and Science, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada

    Scott Bell

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Egorova, E., Tenbrink, T., Purves, R.S. (2015). Where Snow is a Landmark: Route Direction Elements in Alpine Contexts. In: Fabrikant, S., Raubal, M., Bertolotto, M., Davies, C., Freundschuh, S., Bell, S. (eds) Spatial Information Theory. COSIT 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9368. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23374-1_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23374-1_9

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