Formalization of Cognitive Modeling of Environment for Wayfinding

This paper outlines the formal representation of the environment in which it is assumed that a wayfinding process has been occurred through a street network. Wayfinding is a process in which people navigate themselves from an origin to a destination by their common sense geospatial knowledge. Naı̈ve Geography is a field of study that investigates the body of knowledge that people have about the surrounding geospatial world and it deals with common sense knowledge of space. The image schemas which are needed for wayfinding with boundary relations method have been extracted and represented formally with algebraic specifications. These specifications are mentioned in the syntax of a functional programming language, Haskell. It allows us to execute written algebraic specifications and provide conditions for rapid prototyping and formal checks on consistency. These formal specifications are implemented for modeling street network of a part of Tehran, Capital city of Iran. Keywords–formalization, cognitive map, wayfinding, navigation