Introduction:What Landmarks Are, and Why They Are Important - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 18

This argument does not answer the opposite question either. Are landmarks
points of interest? Some navigation systems, especially those addressing tourists,
like to suggest so. In their context shown landmarks are recommendations to visit
these places because they are famous, prominent, en vogue, of historical interest,
or of cultural interest. If the purpose of the service is limited to recommendations
only, neither the compilation of these landmarks for a POI database nor their
presentation on a map aim to support human orientation. Nonetheless, whatever
the purpose of the presentation these landmarks may actually help the tourist with
global orientation after all. Accordingly, these landmarks are at most a subset of the
landmarks studied in this topic. They are those landmarks somebody has selected
to make recommendations for tourists, i.e., those that serve also an interest different
from spatial orientation and reasoning.
A special category of points of interest are those collected by a machine for
an individual. Let us call them favorite places . Favorite places are a product of
machine learning: They can be derived from the individual's prior search, movement
behavior, their social network's behavior, or from the behavior of a group of people
with similar profile. “My home” or “my favorite coffee place” can form landmarks
in my mental spatial representation. These are individual landmarks. The challenge
in communication is that these landmarks may not be shared, such that a place
description “let us meet at my favorite coffee place” may not work, depending on
the recipient's intimacy with my life. Landmarks imply a shared understanding, and
thus, databases should store geographic objects that, since they can be experienced
by all people, have chances to structure many people's mental representations.

1.2.3 Icons

Another term to distinguish landmarks from are icons. Icons have a strong semantics
in semiotics. Their image stands for something else. If the icon, an image, stands for
a geographic entity there are some parallels to landmarks. Consider, for example,
the Eiffel Tower, which is an icon of Paris, if not of France. Typically being an
icon of a geographic entity requires a containment relationship. The Eiffel Tower
is an icon of Paris because it is in (or part of ) Paris, even relatively central, in
addition of being highly visible, standing out with a unique, unambiguous shape,
and carrying a strong emotional attachment of locals and visitors alike. Hence, icons
refer to geographic objects that are landmarks—the geographic objects stand out,
are known, are referred to—but not every landmark has an iconic significance. For
example, Federation Square in Melbourne is a landmark—probably every person in
Melbourne knows it, and it is frequently used in route descriptions—but since it has
no clear image it is not an icon.