Generalizing route descriptions based on the user's spatial knowledge: Considering the user's spatial cognitive information in communicating route instructions

Route descriptions are instructions that tell one how to go from one place to another. The route descriptions generated by classical navigation services, e.g. car navigations are simply turn-by-turn instructions, which do not consider any user's prior spatial knowledge of the environment. In other words, the level of detail of the communicated information is not appropriate for users with previous spatial knowledge of the environment. In this paper, we describe a model to represent a user's spatial knowledge and propose a method to use this knowledge to generalize turn-by-turn route descriptions in order to be more suitable to the individual user's spatial cognitive background.