Introduction:What Landmarks Are, and Why They Are Important - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 17

will find stations, event locations, or public institutions interesting. We got used to
specialized services catering for these markets, such as car navigation systems or
tourist guides. However, what about generic information services? Once we are
able to take our car navigation system out of the car and use it for pedestrian
navigation these systems would need mechanisms to determine the context of a
particular user, or query, to come up with a relevant result. But then, an economic
geography researcher will find perhaps living places and workplaces interesting,
which are typically lacking in point of interest databases. Concerned parents want
to know where their children are, and points representing these locations are also
lacking in point of interest databases. Or a serendipitous armchair traveler might
enjoy to discover locations of objects of unexpected categories, which for a system
are even harder to predict than profiled preferences. Thus, prefabricated and stored
points of interest come along with some paternalism: Something at some location
has been deemed to be interesting by somebody in a specific context.
Are points of interest landmarks? As indicated, current systems choose particular
categories of points of interest for particular contexts, for example, car driving
or using public transport. They do consider a potential service for the user, such
as navigating by a given means. This can include communicating destinations,
presenting waypoints that may service the current mode of travelling, or presenting
choices of routes for a given mode. Since points of interest are service-oriented,
they are also attractive advertising tools. For example, particular brands may want
to ensure that they are present on car drivers' maps. From their perspective it
might be even more attractive to block other brands from being listed. But despite
the commercial flavor and potentially compromised selection of points of interest
there is another substantial argument why points of interests are not landmarks: The
selection of points of interest does not consider the appearance to the human senses,
and more generally, does not aim to support human orientation and wayfinding.
Some of the point of interest categories cannot be expected to be easily recognized
from outside, or to stand out in their neighborhood. For example, the POI category
of medical doctors may produce POIs on a map, but they will actually be hard to
find in the environment for a car driver, with practices being unremarkable from
the outside (according to professional codes of the profession). They also can be
located in hidden places such as in malls, or above ground levels of buildings.
But if the doctor's practice does not stand out in its neighborhood, it will not
structure mental representations because people cannot experience it. Other point
of interest categories may typically be highly visible, for example restaurants.
However, that does not mean automatically that the entities of this category stand
out in their environment. For example, China Town may show a strip of Chinese
restaurants. A POI service will unashamedly show the points of interest in their
high local density. But just because of that reason no single restaurant stands out
in its neighborhood. These restaurants are unsuited to form a point of reference in
mental representations, and a decision point “At the China restaurant turn left” does
not work either. The aggregate China Town , however, may form a landmark in some
context.