Geographic Information Spaces

he relationship between physical space and human cognition has a long history of relating the impact of spatial cues on information retrieval in multiple ways. In this position paper, three distinct problems are considered in terms of the how the mind organizes and retrieves information by location. Each of these is discussed, in turn, below. First and foremost, spatial location is one feature that can be automatically encoded with other information, often, but not always, without effort [5]. This is hardly a new finding, as spatial location has long been known as a foremost organizer for memory going back at least to the Method of Loci. This method described by the ancient Greeks demonstrated that a list of items could be most easily memorized by imagining the items in specific locations along a path. In a more modern version, one often finds themselves able to recall the specific location where a specific section of an audio book was heard while driving. This kind of memory can also been seen in recent studies showing that there may be memory for the computer folder of containing information, but not the information itself [8]. Thus, there is strong evidence to suggest the encoding of spatial location of information is both automatic and enduring. These effects are often amplified by when one returns to the original location where the information was first encoded, as both verbal and non-verbal cues can result in the recall of what appeared to be long-lost information. Finally, these ideas have been integrated into various memory tools, such as location-based reminding systems [4]. In a very different domain, there has been much research on the use of spatial ontologies for geographic information retrieval, when we want to generalize spatial or conceptual terms to improve the search result [3]. For example, a query for " rivers " that can be used as transportation routes might be expanded semantically to include canals, but not lakes and ponds. Alternatively, a query for amusement parks in Pittsburgh might be expanded geographically to include Kennywood, a historic American amusement park that is in the Pittsburgh area, but not strictly within the Pittsburgh city limits. The problem of which dimensions (semantic or spatial) to generalize upon is often quite difficult, as it is often the concept itself or the motivation of the user that determines how such terms should be generalized. Janowicz, Raubal, and Kuhn [3] …