Conclusions: What Is Known and What Is Still Challenging About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 201

more importantly we have established that being a landmark is a property of a
geographic object. There are no objects of type landmark. Consequently, compu-
tational approaches to using landmarks need to incorporate means to determine
whether specific geographic objects may grab our attention. First, a computational
system has to calculate which geographic objects are salient ,i.e.,mayinprinciple
serve as a landmark candidate. From all these candidates, the system then has
to select the most relevant one for any given situation. We termed these two
processes landmark identification and landmark integration . Various approaches
for both these processes have been developed in the past 10 years or so, however,
most fall short when it comes to integrating both processes. More importantly,
these approaches usually have unrealistic demands on the data sets they rely on—
today's infrastructure is simply not able to provide sufficiently detailed and evenly
distributed data on landmarks.
Finally, we have looked at the interaction between human and computer with
specific focus on orientation and wayfinding. All approaches we have discussed
clearly show the importance and benefits of landmark references in this interaction.
However, they also highlight some fundamental issues that still wait for satisfying
solutions.
Thus, while landmarks clearly promise major benefits in human-computer
interaction, and although tremendous progress has been made over the years in
incorporating them into geospatial systems, there are still challenges ahead before
truly intelligent systems emerge.

7.2 What We Aim for: Intelligent Geospatial Systems

Remember HAL, the artificial intelligence that controls the spacecraft and interacts
with the astronauts in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey ? HAL was
capable of remarkable communication skills, including learning mechanisms, some
of them so creepy as to create the suspense in the movie. For example, note this
competence of introspection: “I know I've made some very poor decisions recently,
but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've
still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help
you.” That was way back in 1968. And it was fiction.
How would HAL have been communicating with the astronauts on spatial tasks,
such as orientation and wayfinding? To limit context and expectations, let us stick
with terrestrial environments (and abandon the creepiness of HAL). How would an
intelligent system guide us through traffic, to our hotel, remind us where we would
have a meeting tomorrow or where we have parked our car last night?
We believe such systems should support human interaction with the environment,
but not control this interaction. After all, Alan Turing set as the gauge for an
intelligent system a machine that is capable of communicating like a person, not
one that functions like a person [ 17 ] . Not more and not less. But we have also
pointed out several times in this topic that the goal for intelligent geospatial systems