Conclusions: What Is Known and What Is Still Challenging About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 200

Chapter 7
Conclusions: What Is Known and What Is Still
Challenging About Landmarks

Abstract This chapter concludes the topic. It briefly summarizes what we have
discussed in the previous six chapters and then looks ahead. In particular, we
contemplate what it takes for a geospatial system to be intelligent , and what we still
miss at the moment in order to build such systems. Overall, we believe that we
have provided an appreciation and better understanding of both the challenges and
potential of landmarks in intelligent geospatial systems.

7.1 What We Know: A Short Summary

This topic set out to summarize the current state of knowledge about landmarks
largely based on cognitive research, and how this makes geo-spatial systems more
capable of interacting with human beings.
We started with defining what a landmark actually is, and very soon realized
that this is not a trivial task. We believe that it is crucial to relate the concept of
landmarks directly to people's embodied experience and their cognitive processing
of their living environments and, thus, define landmarks to be geographic objects
that structure human mental representations of space . They serve as anchor points
in our mental representations; their internal structure is not important in that respect.
This sets landmarks apart from other geographic concepts that seem similar, such as
places or points of interest.
We have seen that there is a large body of research in the cognitive and
neurosciences backing this definition. Landmarks serve as anchor and reference
points in our mental representations and communication, which makes them crucial
in our understanding of our world. They do this because landmarks stick out. Each
landmark has some aspects that makes it grab our attention. These aspects depend
on the context in which we encounter a potential landmark.
If we want computers to use landmarks in their interaction with us, we need
to somehow make that elusive concept landmark known to them. We have exem-
plified this by presenting an—admittedly—simple algebraic formalization, but