Communication Aspects: How Landmarks Enrich the Communication Between Human and Machine - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 171

Chapter 6
Communication Aspects: How Landmarks
Enrich the Communication Between Human
and Machine

Abstract Landmarks are fundamental in human communication about their envi-
ronments. This chapter will discuss what it takes to incorporate them into human-
computer interaction. We will look at the principle requirements for such com-
munication, and discuss how computers may produce and understand verbal and
graphical references to landmarks. We will also present some results of studies
testing the advantages of landmarks in human-computer interaction. We will see
that there are huge benefits to gain from this integration, but also that there are still
issues that need to be resolved.

6.1 Landmarks in Human-Computer Interaction

Throughout this topic, we have established that landmarks are a key construct
for humans to make sense of the environment they live in. Landmarks structure
our mental representation of space and they are an important element of any
spatial communication, be it verbal or graphical. Accordingly, producing and
understanding references to landmarks comes natural to us. For a computer, this
is far less straightforward; in fact, it is a rather hard problem as we have already
argued in the introduction. Nonetheless, because it is so natural for us, enabling
computers to use landmark references in their communication as well will lead to
more natural, easier, and more successful human-computer-interaction.
In Sect. 1.3 , we have exemplified what such a communication takes. This chapter
will look at some approaches that aim at enabling it. Following Turing's ideas of a
machine communicating with people without being identified as a machine [ 62 ] , or
more specifically, doing so in a spatial context [ 66 ] , the aim here is not to copy the
human cognitive processes and facilities. Rather, it is sufficient that the surface—
the interface —of the computer's internal processes matches with human expectation
and concepts. Further, it does not make sense to recreate human imperfection,biases,