Determination of Landmarks and Reliability Criteria for Landmarks

The navigation task is a very demanding application for mobile users. The algorithms of present software solutions are based on the established methods of car navigation systems and thus exhibit some inherent disadvantages: findings in spatial cognition research have shown that human users need landmarks for an easy and successful wayfinding. Typically, however, an object is not a landmark per se, but can be one relative to its environment. Unfortunately, these objects are not part of the todays route guidance information systems at the moment. Therefore, it is an aim of research to make landmarks for routing instructions available. In this paper we focus on a method to automatically derive landmarks from existing spatial databases. Here a new approach is presented by investigate existing spatial databases and try to extract landmarks automatically by use of a knowledge discovery process and data mining methods. Furthermore, a reliability criterion for landmarks to evaluate its uniqueness in the route environment will be developed.