From verbal route descriptions to sketch maps in natural environments

The representation of human knowledge extracted from navigations in natural environments is still a research challenge for spatial cognition and computer science. When acting in natural environments people often use verbal route descriptions or sketch maps to transmit their knowledge of the environment, and some of the actions performed. The research developed in this paper introduces a modeling and computational approach using verbal descriptions of human navigating in a natural environment. The objective is to extract the semantic and spatial knowledge emerging from the verbal route descriptions. A formal and semantic model is introduced with a series of rules that merge different route descriptions. The semantic network constructed presents a global view of the route descriptions, and is used to generate a map representation from them. The whole approach is illustrated by a case study.