Elicitation of Spatial Language to Support Cross-Cultural Geographic Information Systems

There exists a conceptual gap between the methods people naturally use to structure spatial relations and the functionality of user interfaces for geographic information systems to support these methods. Spatial cognitive methods may be inferred by eliciting subjects’ verbal description of “real world”, everyday spatial relations. The resulting collection of natural spatial language may then be used as a realistic goal in the GIS user interface design process, especially in query language formulation. Furthermore, because many potential GIS users are non-English speakers it is also helpful to survey the cross-cultural extent of spatial-linguistic terminology; to do so foreign subjects should be tested in their native environments. Verbal descriptions of geographic space may then be empirically compared to performance in executing simple geographical analyses using GIS-like testing software, or may directly support theories of spatial cognition. It is suggested that instead of teaching users to perform better using current GIS technology, we may support the design of more intuitive GISs by studying the way people naturally think about, and describe, geographic space. A summary of such a study, a related pilot study, and a methodological template for testing Spanish and English-speakers are each described here.