Approaches to an Ontology for

Pedestrian Navigation Services

Barbara Corona, Stephan Winter
Institute for Geoinformation
Vienna University of Technology
Gusshausstrasse 27-29, 1040 Vienna, Austria
tel +43-1-5880112712, fax +43-1-5880112799

fcorona,winterg@geoinfo.tuwien.ac.at

Abstract. This paper presents a structured formal model of navigation instructions for pedestrians. The formal model is derived from a
convergent set of conceptual objects and actions collected from a variety of resources: cognitive and psychological research in human waynding, agreed denitions, implementations, and linguistics. The model
is demonstrated applying a recently proposed markup language for a
route description tested with visitors of our institute.

cognitive structure of spatial knowledge, ontology of space,

navigation, location based services.
Keywords:

Introduction

This paper investigates recent research in human information needs

for way-nding in unfamiliar environments. Its goal is to nd a
commonly shared set of concepts of objects and actions in the instructions of a navigation service for pedestrians. We call this set
of concepts specied in a formal way an ontology. The application
of ontology in information modelling is quite new, compared to its
philosophical roots. Motivation was the need of new concepts for
treating semantics in information sharing (Gruber, 1993; Guarino,
1997). A navigation service is a piece of software in the middle of a
three-tiered architecture (Fig. 1). It deals with a variety of individual
users on the one hand and dierent and distributed data warehouses
on the other hand. Hence the ontology of pedestrian navigation will
provide a formal framework for information production and thus for
service and data specications.

The three tiers of interoperating services: warehouses, applications, and wireless

clients (from OGC, 2000).
Fig. 1.

Linking availabel data with pedestrian needs dierent universes

of discourse are concerned: the world as perceived by traveling pedestrians, instructions coming from services, and the representation of
the world in databases. Formal descriptions are required to support
a mapping between the dierent universes. The mapping is needed
in both directions: the user's needs should control the prole of information to look for in databases, and the qualities of available
datasets should be evaluated for selection and ordering purposes.
Both directions are interesting; they are related to the research areas of adaptive services, data cataloguing and metadata. In this paper we conne our interest to the part dealing with pedestrians and
navigation services, i.e., the information needs and the information
provided by services. We do not deal with datasets and the construction of information.
One motivation for this paper is our interest in the design of
navigation services for pedestrians. Such services are a hot topic since
mobile telecommunication provides for the rst time ubiquituous
access to both, information services and the own position (locationbased services ). The design of such systems is still an open topic;
only prototypes are available.
The other motivation is a more fundamental one: we are interested in methods that can be used to derive an ontology. The re-

sources considered here are research papers reporting human subject testing | human behavior, verbal descriptions, and diagrams
|, general navigation services, and linguistic relations of concepts
(Sec. 3). In a few cases the authors extracted a formal ontology,
in other cases the ontology was extracted by us from the texts or
graphics. The substantial work available allows us to search for commonalities of concepts found by the dierent authors (Sec. 4). We
expect that the set of shared concepts will nd broad acceptance in
dening pedestrians' information needs. The convergent ontology is
structured for a skeleton of route instructions. This ontology will be
applied test-wise to a guidance from the next underground station
to our institute (Sec. 5). At the end we discuss our ndings (Sec. 6),
and we outline future work (Sec. 7).

Review of previous work

For this paper we have considered dierent kinds of resources: empirical studies in cognitive and psychological research, denitive texts,
multimedia, and lingual categorization. Empirical studies report on
case studies, interviews, or human subject testing in navigation (e.g.,
Denis et al., 1999; Moulin and Kettani, 1999). Denitive texts set
the vocabulary of a domain or task by denition. For instance, trac
regulations set up an ontology of (positive) human behavior (Kuhn,
2000). Standards can also be considered as an ontology, representing
agreements of domain experts, e.g., the specication of Geographic
Data Files (ISO, 2000), or a DTD for navigation information. Multimedia comes into play when considering graphical means for communication, like sketches or maps. For instance, car navigation systems
communicate information by verbal instructions and maps (Corona
and Winter, 2001). Lingual categorization deals with the abstraction level of verbs and nouns; a tool providing hierarchies is WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998). All these resources can be used to derive an
ontology by a formal approach of extracting nouns (objects), verbs
(actions), and relations between them, as partly done by the authors cited (Kuhn, 2000; Timpf, 2001). We will do this for all the
considered work up to a semi-formal level in Section 3. Note that
the domain or task of the cited work diers slightly, leading to overlapping ontologies.

Route descriptions for pedestrians are investigated by Denis et al.

(1999). From the comparison of detailed route descriptions they
search for a minimal set of instructions for several routes. Moulin
and Kettani (1999) make a categorization of actions in route descriptions: verbal expressions are used to express moving actions or
orientation changes, and nominal expressions are used to refer to objects of the urban environment. Montello (1997) and Lovelace et al.
(1999) measure the quality of route instructions by studying parameters that are apparently static: the familiarity with the environment
or the spatial knowledge can be used to adapt the route or the form
of the instructions. Golledge (1995) proposes the investigation of
path selection criteria based on cognitive mapping and on route selection criteria that change as the environment changes in function
of time. Garling et al. (1986) classies the environment to predict
problems of spatial orientation: at a rst level they consider recognition by size and form, at a second level they consider visibility of
parts, and at a third level they quantify the complexity of the spatial
layout. This and other external representations of the environment
take their advantages from diagrammatic reasoning (Tversky and
Lee, 1999), but mental representation of way-nding has been investigated more than the processes of way-nding itself. The user's
imperfect observation of the space can be corrected by a technique
that employs metaphor specications and image-schemata (Raubal
and Frank, 2000). Timpf (2001) shows how dierences in granularity
of tasks and objects permit to design a hierarchy of navigation tasks.
Communication by graphic displays and verbal instructions is
provided by car navigation systems. Such systems can be used to collect the concepts built in them, and to compare them with pedestrians' needs (Corona and Winter, 2001). In the same way vocabularies
of protocols and data exchange standards can be used. Consider for
example the navigation markup language NVML (Sekiguchi et al.,
1999), an XML application. The document type denition of NVML
represents a formal ontology of the domain of route instructions in
dierent modes (text, pictures, voice).
Concepts found in the above approaches are checked for their
relations in WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998). WordNet provides for nouns
a generalisation hierarchy (is a -hierarchy) as well as an aggregation

hierarchy (part of -hierarchy). Additionally, WordNet is used in the

context of this paper to eliminate synonyms.

Approaches to an ontology

To derive an ontology for pedestrian navigation we investigate three

approaches covering the behavior and communication of people and
services: cognitive and psychological research as well as agreed standards or implemented services allow to extract central navigation
concepts. Then these concepts are grouped by abstraction to nd
their common linguistic root.

3.1 Ontology from cognitive and psychological research

The review of the work in cognitive and psychological research provides the basic concepts for route descriptions. We have extracted
these concepts from each paper; categories of them are reported in
Figure 2.
Orientation
Denis 99
Timpf 01
Moulin 99
Montello 97
Raubal 99
Grling 86
Tversky 99
Golledge 95

Fig. 2.

Environment

Instructions
*

Route
*
*

Map

Recognition

*
*
*
*

*
*

*
*
*

Concept categories found in research literature.

We found no contradictions between the authors' ndings. However, they select for each paper a narrow focus that allows to explore
a specic question in detail. That produces a small representative
class of concepts in each paper. The gure shows that no category
is isolated, and overlap of categories is large.
Behind these classes of concepts, objects and actions can be extracted with more detail. Consider for example the category Instructions. For Denis et al. this category summarizes the dierent actions
from the pedestrian point of view. They asked human subjects for
route descriptions; the instructions contained objects referring to

landmarks and actions indicated by verbs, as walk, cross, continue,

or arrive. For Moulin and Kettani this category identies the structure of the actions elaborated by a software system that generates
routes: objects in the instructions are related to the distance and
in uence area, while actions are verbal expression divided into three
subcategories: movement, position, and orientation. The dierent
perceptions can be merged by eliminating synonyms and ordering
the concepts in abstraction and aggregation relations.

3.2 Ontology from agreements, specications, and

services
Sets of concepts can be derived from common agreements, like laws
or standards, or from services, both specied or implemented. The
method is the same as before | ontology from texts |, only the
kinds of resources dier. Consider, for example, route planners on
the Web: they are mostly for car navigation, and they are mature,
i.e. they are suciently close to the car driver's ontology to be found
useful. Car drivers are much more limited in their freedom to move,
compared to pedestrians; besides they perceive their environment
with a coarser granularity. For car drivers an instruction lists single
actions:
begin at
turn R/L ...
bear R/L on
stop at

A on B

and go N-S-E-W

for X km

C
D

and go N-S-E-W

for Y km

Each action is composed of four parts: a verb that indicates the

type of action (turn, bear, merge, continue), a name or a landmark
related to that action, an orientation (cardinal direction or other),
and a distance. This simple representation corresponds to the simple
environment of car drivers: a linear street network. Applying route
planners to pedestrian guidance shows overlap of some concepts and
supplements of others (Corona and Winter, 2001). Pedestrian navigation is more complex, but not dierent.
Markup languages are used to exchange navigation information
in a structured way. By analyzing them, one nds again a set of concepts that was agreed upon as complete when the language was accepted as standard. Consider, for example, the NaVigation Markup

Language NVML1 (Sekiguchi et al., 1999). NVML provides not only

a set of (particular detailed) concepts, it is also hierarchically structured, being an XML application.
Categorizing the concepts for objects and actions from these approaches we obtain the results reported in Figure 3. It appears that
for pedestrians the objects | street network and landmarks | are
not suciently dened, in contrast to car drivers. For actions it is just
the same: pedestrian way-nding needs a more detailed knowledge
compared to that of car drivers. The variety of environment features
in pedestrian's scale and the freedom of movement for people on
foot exceed by far that of car drivers. This is why we distinguish the
elements of car navigation instructions, steps, from the elements of
pedestrian navigation instructions, called units. Units have a more
complex structure and variability than the steps for car navigation
shown above.
The formalization of the concepts in NVML appears to be incomplete: objects are well dened, but actions and environmental interactions (Walking and Reference ) are not enough detailed, although
their importance has been realized. These dierences lead also to
incompatibilities between data formats for the dierent services: the
concepts of NVML appear to be quite dierent to the Geographic
Data Files (GDF) (ISO, 2000) as used for car navigation data.
Reference
Car Drivers
NVML

Fig. 3.

Street net
*

Landmark
*

Unit

Step
*

Walking
*

Concepts used in the ontology from comparing systems.

3.3 Ontology from linguistics

Having found central concepts of pedestrian navigation, they can be
categorized into families by abstraction, and hierarchical dependencies can be shown. The tool we used is WordNet2 .
1
2

NVML is a proposal under consideration; it is not a standard.

http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/wn/

Figure 4 presents relevant parts of the generalization hierarchy.

Concepts found in the previous subsections are set in italics. Places
left blank in the gure relate to concepts that do not appear in the
ontology. Additionally, the gure shows nodes where two branches
meet, and their abstraction up to the top level concepts. Consider
route for example: route is a specialization of a line (a spatial location dened by a real or imaginary unidimensional extent), which is
a specialization of location (a point or extent in space). A location
is a kind of object, which is a kind of entity.
6th level

5th level

4th level

3rd level.

2nd level

top level

object

entity

relation

abstraction

route
location
landmark
map
instruction

unit
walking
activity
orientation

Fig. 4.

Generalisation hierarchy of some navigation concepts.

While the concepts found in the above approaches are all at

medium levels in the generalization hierarchy, they belong to three
top level categories: entity, abstraction and activity. Entities are the
concepts corresponding to real things in the environment, the objects. Activities are the concepts corresponding to instructions, the
actions. Abstractions are the concepts related to the way information
is presented to users.

A converging ontology

From the study in Section 3 it is now possible to dene objects and

actions that are central for the navigation of pedestrians. In the rst
step an ontology is constructed from converging concepts. In the

second step the concepts (objects and actions) are structured to nd

a generic skeleton for route instructions.

4.1 Merging the commonalities

The dierent approaches to a categorization of objects and actions
in way-nding contribute, from their specic perspective and task,
to a convergent ontology of pedestrian navigation. Figure 5 shows
the principal objects needed for navigation services for pedestrians.
current pos.

tot distance x wa lking time

map

destination

route
Instructions and/or voice messages

options
add. info

unit
track
actions

descriptions

areas
boundaries
features names
symb and abbr.

landmarks
attributes
places
orientation
names

legend
scale, coord.

distance x time
Small map

Fig. 5.

The objects in an ontology of pedestrian navigation.

Objects can be classied with more detail, namely for the verbal representations (instructions) and the graphical representations
(maps). Consider, for example, landmarks in instructions: they consist of architeture (monuments, bridges), commercial landmarks (kiosk),
street features (crossing), and others. Similar for the areas in maps:
they consist of street areas, green areas, urban areas, and others.
Maps represent physical and social features, to be customized by selection, zoom, or pan. Instructions contain physical, social, but also
instructive features. Moreover, a map represents a part or the total

route from a bird's eye view, while an instruction describes the route
sequentially and from the user's perspective.
The kinds of actions that pedestrians make are presented in Figure 6. Four categories of verbs (actions) that regard the movement
of the user can be distinguished: orientation, starting, moving, and
destination. The orientation-actions aim to turn the user so that his
front is orientated in the correct direction for the next movement.
The moving-actions are the richest category and contain all possible actions a pedestrian can make in relation to the urban environment. Place, names and landmarks (physical elements that can be
viewed by pedestrians) together with distance and time are the objects related to actions (Couclelis and Gottsegen, 1997). Directions
and attributes complete the information. Other actions not regarding the user movement can be useful to connect the visual scenario
of pedestrians (what they truly see) to the instructions received by
the mobile device. The descriptions about an element of the scenario
or about the user's current position represent the fth category and
are not related to physical actions, as those above mentioned, but
have the same importance as statements.

1st Orientation

2nd Starting

3rd Moving

Face to,
turn to

Begin to,
leave the

Walk,
walk towards/
across/down/
out of/from-to/
go straight,
cross, continue,
go along

4th Destination
Arrive at,
reach, find

5th Static
You are in,
there is-at

direction
Name, place,
landmark

Fig. 6.

about
Fordistance
:
about time

The actions in an ontology of pedestrian navigation.

4.2 A skeleton of route instructions

Compared to car navigation, pedestrian navigation appears to be
more complex; hence possible route description elements should be
investigated for being essential (Denis et al., 1999) and hierarchically structured. Elements of a more detailed level appear of less
importance and may be even optional.
Reasons for a hierarchical structure are manifold. One is control
of redundancy in information. Another is demonstrated by execution
planning for robots (Rofer, 1999): levels of granularity structure a
task. Reaching the destination is the overall goal, following the segments of the route is a level of higher detail, and taking into account
local obstacles, for instance a stair step, is again a level of more detail. A pedestrian (not necessarily the robot) could reach his goal
without being told to look out for the step. A third reason for a
hierarchical structure lies in change: details in the real world change
fast, causing problems with actual data and costs of the service.
The following skeleton is built from the convergent ontology by
applying the structure of NVML. The internal structure of each action remains complex with regard to the enormous amount of verbs,
references and attributes in guidance instructions. This skeleton will
be tested in the next section for a practical example.
Current position
Info: coordinates, category, ..
Navigation
Distance and Time
Map for the total route
List of instruction
1st Action:
Orientation/Starting/Moving/Destination/Static
verb + attribute
place name
landmark
direction
orientation
distance
time
small map
info: name of the landmark, ..
2nd Action
...
Last Action
Options and Web Links

End Navigation
Destination
Address/landmark
Info: coordinates, image, url, ..

Case study: guiding visitors to our institute

A visitor arriving at the closest underground station needs guidance

to go to our institute: she communicates via her personal digital
assistant with a navigation service. Her location is determined automatically (platform of line U4, Karlsplatz), and she put in the
destination before she started traveling (Institute for Geoinformation; matched with 3rd oor of Gusshausstrasse 27-29). Now the
navigation service produces guiding instructions3 using the concepts
found above.
An extract of the route description is presented here in NVML.
The markup language allows to describe the route in terms of the
actions and objects found above; moreover, it structures the instructions by hierarchical nesting, representing a well-formed XML document. The structure matches with the skeleton derived in Section
4.2. Terminology for the concepts is very close to our ontology: actions like orientation or moving can be found directly. The complete
guidance le and the document type denition are available4.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="xxx">
<!DOCTYPE nvml SYSTEM http://yyy/nvml.dtd>
<start>
<point map-area="Wien MZK">
<name>U4 Karlsplatz</name>
<category>Underground Station</category>
<coordinates>
<latitude>N48.11,53.2</latitude>
<longitude>E16.22,27.7</longitude>
</coordinates>
<address>U-Station Karlsplatz, Vienna</address>
</point area>
<info total distance="550m">
<info total duration="9min">
<info>
3
4

Available for Web and WAP browsers:

http://gi13.geoinfo.tuwien.ac.at/users/winter/ss00/MobileNav.html
ftp://ftp.geoinfo.tuwien.ac.at/winter/corona01approaches-code.zip.

<text>U4 Platform Karlsplatz</text>

<voice> This is U4 Station in Karlspatz</voice>
<image src="map/Vienna U-Stations.jpg"/>
</info>
</start>
<navigation>
<actions>
<orientation>...</orientation>
<starting>
<infoaction>
<text>Karl Borromaeus Church</text>
<note>Cultural info available</note>
</infoaction>
</starting>
<moving>
<text>
go straight for
<distance>3 blocks</distance>
up to
<name>Gusshausstrasse</name>
</text>
<calcdist> calculated distance: 250m </calcdist>
</moving>
</actions>
</navigation>
<destination> ... </destination>

Discussion

For designing navigation services tting to the user's needs this paper
presents a structured formal model of navigation instructions for
pedestrians. The formal model is derived from a convergent set of
conceptual objects and actions collected from a variety of resources:
cognitive and psychological research in human way-nding, agreed
denitions, implementations, and linguistics. It comes out that the
dierent ontologies largely overlap, and that the overlapping parts,
after the elimination of synonyms, are coherent between the dierent
authors or sources.
Guidance of pedestrians requires personalization due to the huge
variety of dierent user demands; this causes the diculty to set up a
common schema that contains a complete set of navigation concepts.
To cover a large scale of user needs the approach in this paper was
not to take the intersection of concepts but the union. Performances
of human subjects in the real world result in validating this idea of

large access to structured data. Moreover, geographic information

accessible by mobile technology is becoming available to more and
more people and users of mobile devices receive information in both
qualitative and quantitative ways. A guidance service should allow
the user to link this external information to her mental view.
The presented formal model is demonstrated applying a recently
proposed markup language for a route description tested with visitors of our institute. The strategy is again human subject testing:
the route instructions derived from the formal model help to determine where people face way-nding diculties and how the information has to be changed in order to improve the communication. The
markup language used to structure the instructions appears technical
and similar to computer languages rather than to natural languages.
The advantage of this type of language for structuring information
content is in the simultaneous utilization of many types of media,
like voice messages, sketches, written instructions, local maps, or
perspective views. Today no browser can view NVML instructions;
the design of the user interface will be a challenge for future work.

Future work

The tests of the skeleton model are poor so far, as they have been
performed only with one route and a few persons. We need extensive
tests, especially with extreme cases, to nd limitations and gaps in
the found ontology.
Adaptive services present routes and instructions tting to the
individual user, her interests, needs and handicaps. Hence, the general ontology for pedestrian navigation needs to be specialized for
groups of users with common needs, like tourists, business travellers,
handicapped persons, or parents with small children.
An ontology for pedestrian navigation is not the only ontology
travelling people apply (Timpf, 2001): this ontology needs to be combined with an ontology of public or private transportation, and guidance should integrate multi-modal transport where needed.
As stated in the introduction, we limited our focus to the aspect of communication concepts, looking at the client and service
level (Fig. 1). Designing a service comprises the warehouse level as
well. The concepts found in our research will be complemented by

concepts used in databases or by value-adding services. Comparable

concepts need to be matched also, where the formal specication will
help.

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