Cognitive Foundations

• What are the spatial concepts to implement in a GIS?
• How should they be presented to users?

• Spatial concepts: Concerned with people's thinking and reasoning.
• Spatial data models: Concerned with capturing and formalizing semantics.
• Spatial data structures: Concerned with implementation aspects such as performance, storage amount, and access speed.

1970s:

Decade of spatial data structures. Hardware was slow, and people thought the problem was to master the computers' limited resources.

1980s:

Search for the universal spatial data model. Result: not one spatial data model, but many.

1990s:

Cognitive considerations, including domain-specific studies.

Spatial Concepts

• Help people to organize and structure their perception of geographic space.
• Multiple concepts (experience, context), used simultaneously.
• Selecting the most appropriate for solving a specific task
• Switching between them whenever necessary, appropriate, or convenient.
• Example: A road.

Perspectives Shared by Multiple Spatial Concepts

• Types of spaces (relative to human-body size and to operations people perform, e.g., Zubin spaces).
• Types of spatial relations among objects (e.g., image schemata from bodily experiences, and their metaphoric use).
• Types of questions users ask: "Where is this?" (object view) vs. "What is here?" (field view).

Geographic Databases:
Cognitively Motivated Research Needs

• An algebra over Image Schemata.
  
  
• Databases systems adaptive to different perspectives, tasks, and cultures.
  
  
• Database user interfaces
  • multi-modal (voice, sketch, gestures)
    
  • for large-scale displays
    
  • portable devices