Introduction:What Landmarks Are, and Why They Are Important - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 7

Fig. 1.4 Landmarks: ( a ) New York City Apple store; ( b ) Sydney opera house

interests and particular age, but not for others. The Sydney Opera House (Fig. 1.4 b )
may be a prime example of a globally recognized landmark, but its cleaners may see
this labyrinth of a complex building differently, on another spatial granularity, and
perhaps with other landmarks within for their own orientation and communication
purposes ('the box office', 'the stage', 'Bistro Mozart'). Thus, being a landmark
is not a global characteristic of an object, but a function of parameters such as
the individual that perceives and memorizes an environment, the communication
situation, the decision at hand, and the time. The latter argument means that even
prototypes cannot be considered prototypes in all cases, since there might be no
such thing that is always, i.e., in any context a well-suited landmark.

1.1.3 An Intensional Approach

With only limited successes of extensional and cognitive semantics approaches,
perhaps an intensional approach to capture the concept of landmarks is more
promising, specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions of belonging to the
category landmark . In order to relate to people's (in principle, any cognizing
beings') embodied experience and cognitive processing of their living environments
the following intensional definition will be chosen for this topic:

Definition: Landmarks are geographic objects that structure human mental
representations of space.

Other intensional definitions appear to be dependent on this one. For example,
Wikipedia's “anything that is easily recognizable” (Sect. 1.1 ) has this cognitive
flavor built in if recognition is a match of a perception with a mental representation.
The more generic “Landmarks are prominent objects in the environment” can be
understood in two highly correlated directions. One refers to perceivable properties