APPLICATION DEPENDENT GENERALIZATION - THE CASE OF PEDESTRIAN NAVIGATION

The need for application dependent visualization has steadily been growing with the advent of the internet and is even enforced by the availability of mobile computers. One of the assumed “killer applications” for mobile phones are location based services, allowing to present location information to a mobile user depending on his/her current position. Typical examples for such a location based service is the provision of information about restaurants in the vicinity of the user, or the shortest path from the current position to the next bus stop, etc. When displaying spatial information on a small display, the information presented has to be clear and distinct in order to be visible, and understandable by the user. This is even more true, as the mobile user is typically subjected to a high cognitive load while navigating and has to rely on extremely reduced and adequate information. An approach is presented to generate a compact description and a visualization of a route depending on the starting point and destination of the user. For a save and unambiguous guidance, it must be guaranteed that the relevant information can be grasped at a glance. This involves that important information is highlighted, whereas irrelevant information is reduced. Obviously, this is a generalization problem. Different cartographic operations will be tested and evaluated with respect to their applicability. Important objects like starting and endpoint will have to be enhanced. An important issue is the fact that different generalization levels will be applied in one description, thus there will be several “scales” within one presentation.