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Contextual Adaptability of Navigational Spatial Descriptions: A Pragmatic Comparison

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Progress in Cartography

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography ((ICA))

Abstract

Different forms of spatial descriptions are used to communicate information in the context of navigation in urban environments. When generated by computers, such descriptions are combinations of map features in a predefined way. Unlike computers, however, people are capable of flexibly generating navigational spatial descriptions by taking into account a wide array of different contextual factors, e.g. a user’s prior knowledge and the structure of the environment. This paper deploys the notion of pragmatics to compare formal addresses, route descriptions (generated either by computers or humans), and destination descriptions in terms of their adaptability to contextual factors in order to identify the means to creating more cognitively sound information systems.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Surveying and Geospatial Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

    Farid Karimipour & Negar Alinaghi

  2. Research Group Geoinformation, Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Negar Alinaghi & Andrew Frank

  3. Institute for Cartography and Geoinformation, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Paul Weiser

Authors
  1. Farid Karimipour
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  2. Negar Alinaghi
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  3. Paul Weiser
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  4. Andrew Frank
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Farid Karimipour .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Inst Kartographie Geo-Medientechnik, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Georg Gartner

  2. Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Wien, Austria

    Markus Jobst

  3. Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Wien, Austria

    Haosheng Huang

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Karimipour, F., Alinaghi, N., Weiser, P., Frank, A. (2016). Contextual Adaptability of Navigational Spatial Descriptions: A Pragmatic Comparison. In: Gartner, G., Jobst, M., Huang, H. (eds) Progress in Cartography. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19602-2_25

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