A model for navigation experience sharing through social navigation networks (SoNavNets)

Navigation systems/services have become commonplace and people's reliance on them for mobility is continuously increasing. Modern navigation systems/services are sophisticated tools offering a variety of features for navigation assistance and guidance in many geographic areas. The real-world navigation environments in navigation systems/services are modeled as maps allowing computations that assist in navigation decision making. For this reason, navigation systems/services are referred to as model-centric as they can only operate where the model (i.e., map) exists. A novel approach, made possible through Web 2.0 technology, is sharing navigation experience, thus experience-centric, through social navigation networks (SoNavNets). While they have common goals, model-centric and experience-centric methods of navigation assistance are different with respect to how they prepare and provide navigation assistance. In this paper, SoNavNets and a model for navigation experience sharing are discussed.