Topologic and Metric Decision Criteria for Wayfinding in the Real World and the WWW

There are many strategies for wayfinding strategies in the physical world and the World Wide Web (WWW). The decision processes of these strategies use various cues from the environment, such as topologic relations, information from other navigators, images of places, semantics of objects, and metric information. This paper discusses how the representation of the goal and the environment in the agent's cognitive map influence the decision criteria applied during the wayfinding process. We give a classification of decision situations that use one or several attributes as input, and look at the role of the user's preferences for decisionmaking. Two wayfinding simulations demonstrate the combination of goaldependent criteria and preferences both for the physical world and the WWW.