Introduction:What Landmarks Are, and Why They Are Important - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 2

Fig. 1.1 A globally known
landmark (CC-BY-SA 3.0 by
Benh Lieu Song , modified)

of landmarks. But then this definition is also somehow imbalanced, first speaking
of 'anything' in the intensional part, and then mentioning only examples taken from
the built environment in the ostensive part.
Let us have a look into another dictionary. Merriam Webster distinguishes three
meanings: “(1) an object or structure on land that is easy to see and recognize, (2) a
building or place that was important in history, or (3) a very important event or
achievemen t 4 . ”

￿ Meaning 1 is more or less covering the previous definition, although it is

questionable why landmarks should be restricted to land. Landmarks arguably
exist, for example, also on the ice cap of the North Pole, indoors, and even at
sea: Navigators have used Polaris as a landmark for centuries. But importantly
Meaning 1 refers again to cognitive processes based on embodied experience,
which is what we will build upon later. Let us ignore that the wording requires
'seeing' in addition to 'recognizing'. If seeing would be required blind people
would have no concept of landmarks, or soundscapes would have no landmarks,
which is both not true. However, the embodied experience postulated above is
expressed here in the reference to locatable objects or structures.

4 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/landmark , last visited 23/12/2013.