Introduction:What Landmarks Are, and Why They Are Important - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 3

Fig. 1.2 A landmark: an
object made to mark out a
location or boundary on land

￿ Meaning 2 adds time as an essential factor to embodied experience: Landmarks

are not only what 'is easy to see and recognize' but also what has been 'easy to
see and recognize' in the past and therefore still can be located by memory.

￿ Meaning 3, relating to events and achievements, is of a different nature. Despite

the fact that events and achievements can be located in principle—everything
happens somewhere, even a Black Friday or Global Financial Crisis was
produced somewhere—the relationship to a location is now taking a back seat,
and what is now 'easy to see and recognize' is answering a what question rather
than a where question. With this shift of focus comes along a mapping of the
concept from its source domain of physical objects located in space to a target
domain of temporal objects [ 15 ] . This means Meaning 3 is taking the concept
of landmark rather metaphorically [ 26 ] , preserving the characteristic of being
cognitively salient, and thus, structuring memories.

Etymologically, the English word landmark, or land and mark , comes from an
old form landmearc (“boundary”) or landgemirce (“boundary, limit, frontier”), and
can also be found in German, Danish and Swedish. (Polygonal) boundaries are
constructed by setting out the corners (Fig. 1.2 ) . Hence, the cornerstones bear all
the meaning of the boundary, or are re- mark -able.
Sticking for a while with “an object or structure on land that is easy to [...]
recognize”, WordNet [ 9 , 32 ] , which is not a dictionary in the strict sense of the
word, but rather a semi-formal ontology or lexicon of concepts, provides us with
the following conceptual hierarchy of the term:

Level 0 Landmark —(the position of a prominent or well-known object in a
particular landscape; “the church steeple provided a convenient landmark”)