Conceptual Modeling of Highway Navigation

Navigation is a fundamental human activity and an integral part of everyday life. Humans use their knowledge about previous experiences with geographic space to find their way. Considerable research in the areas of cognitive science, psychology, and artificial intelligence has been carried out to examine the means by which humans navigate. Humans need to abstract from reality and form concepts of space in order to reason about space or carry out tasks e.g., navigating. Concepts are used to organize space and to structure the perception of reality. They depend strongly on the knowledge of the human and on the task at hand. Humans may use multiple levels of abstraction, representing different parts of geographic space, to carry out a single navigation task. Although descriptions of spatial concepts already exist, they are defined in natural language and, therefore, lack the formality to be implemented. Conceptual modeling is a design technique that models the concepts of an application (e.g., highway navigation) on a highly abstracted level. Conceptual models provide the possibility to communicate spatial concepts in a formal and unambiguous way. For large and complex applications in Geographic Information Systems, conceptual modeling is a promising technique. It is expected to improve the interaction and the communication between designer, domain expert and user. This thesis concentrates on conceptual modeling of human highway navigation. A conceptual model with multiple representations is derived from the reasoning processes, that take place while navigating a highway network. The formalization process uses the method of algebraic specifications as high-level language. The problem treated here is a simpler version of the open problem of planning and navigating a multi-mode trip. We expect the methods and results found here for highway systems to apply to other systems such as river transportation networks and railroad networks. Acknowledgments I thank Max J. Egenhofer for his help and his guidance throughout this research effort. He clarified my ideas and brought me back on track more than once. I also thank him for his patience during all the hours I was asking thousands of questions. I thank my advisory committee for their valuable input at critical moments of my research. I thank all the members of SVE 698 Spatial Reasoning for their acceptance and open-mindedness, for their input and criticism, and for the enthusing and scintillating working environment they created. Espacially, I thank Gary for his open ear and his patience correcting my English …