Scott Freundschuh and
Max Egenhofer Transactions in GIS 2 (4): 361-375, 1997.
Abstract
The way people conceptualize space is an important consideration
for the design of geographic information systems, because a better
match with people's thinking is expected to lead to easier-to-use
information systems. Everyday space, the basis to geographic
information systems (GISs), has been characterized in the
literature as being either small-scale (from table-top to room-size
spaces) or large-scale (inside-of-building spaces to city-size
space). While this dichotomy of space is grounded in the view from
psychology that people's perception of space, spatial cognition,
and spatial behavior are experience-based, it is in contrast to
current GISs, which enable us to interact with large-scale spaces
as though they were small-scale or manipulable. We analyze
different approaches to characterizing spaces and propose a unified
view in which space is based on the physical properties of
manipulability, locomotion, and size of space. Within the structure
of our framework, we distinguish six types of spaces: manipulable
object space (smaller than the human body), non-manipulable object
space (greater than the human body, but less than the size of a
building), environmental space (from inside building spaces to
city-size spaces), geographic space (state, country, and
continent-size spaces), panoramic space (spaces perceived via
scanning the landscape), and map space. Such a categorization is an
important part of Naive Geography, a set of theories of how people
intuitively or spontaneously conceptualize geographic space and
time, because it has implications for various theoretical and
methodological questions concerning the design and use of spatial
information tools. Of particular concern is the design of effective
spatial information tools that lead to better communication.
Full article
Scott Freundschuh and
Max Egenhofer
