Introduction:What Landmarks Are, and Why They Are Important - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 16

Fig. 1.6 POI database entry for the Tate Modern

“As interrelated processes, cognition and language make use of places. For example,
spatial reasoning happens on qualitative spatial relationships between places [ 12 ] , and
everyday language refers to named and unnamed places (e.g., on Federation Square , at
the road intersection ) and the relationships between them (e.g., at Birrarung Marr near
Federation Square ). Sketches, as non-metric graphical externalizations of cognitive or
verbal representations, also reflect configuration knowledge of places and their relation-
ships. And yet, despite recent progress in neuroscience and cognitive science our knowledge
about cognitive representations and reasoning is not sufficient to formally characterize
the entities, relations, and operations that would enable us to build a system that reflects
the computational processes of spatial representations in our mind.”
Whichever perspective is taken, the philosophical or the geographic, place covers
a different meaning to landmarks. From the philosophical perspective, every object
has a place, but not every object is a landmark. From the geographic perspective,
places can also function as landmarks, but are then stripped of their rich internal
meaning and instead linked with a location. More specifically, since places are
inhabited, their inside or internal structure must be important. Places are related
to being, or, as Tuan called it, resting [ 45 ] . Since landmarks are points of reference
to locate other objects, their outside must be important—as they are perceived or
imagined by a person linking two objects. Landmarks are related to movement,
such as passing by (waypoints), turning (decision points), or heading (distant points
of orientation).

1.2.2 Points of Interest

Some geographic information systems contain points of interest databases, and may
use this terminology, which is sometimes abbreviated to POI ,alsointheiruser
interface. For example, car navigation services and public transport trip planners
offer users to specify their destination by selecting a point of interest from their
database, and mobile location-based services provide points of interests on their
you-are-here maps. A point of interest is simply a point (typically a point on a
map, or a GPS coordinate in some spatial reference system) that somebody by some
authority has declared to be interesting. A point of interest typically comes with a
name, carrying the semantics of what can be found at the location characterized by
this point (Fig. 1.6 ) .
Yet what can be considered to be interesting depends on the particular context
a person may find themselves in. As a car driver, they will find gas stations,
parking houses, and speed cameras interesting. As a tourist they will find museums,
churches, restaurants and also hotels interesting. As a public transport user they