Finished reading an article on Spatial Cognition by A. Frank. The idea he had was to ask an agent1 to constructing a map replicating reality. Agent2 had to use that map to navigate the physical space. From the measurement of correctness and effectiveness of the agent2 interaction in the environment he could define the goodness of the realised map by agent1.

He constructed, therefore a three stage model of the situation as follows: Level 1: Reality, what is for real in the environment; Level 2: Beliefs, what the agent 1 and 2 think of the perceived reality; Level 3: Map, what the agent 1 has perceived and decided to be represented of the reality with the aim of guiding agent 2.

The author describe the two-tiered reality and beliefs model in which facts describing the simulated environment and the simulated agent’s beliefs of this environment are separated.

I wonder if it is possible to substitute one of the agent with a human using the system, namely with agent2. We can invent then a treasure-hunt task in the city environment where one or more “human” has to follows a series of steps to find an object. The map is defined and shared between agent1 and the participant/s. Agent1 has also the ability to see how his humans partner/s are using the map to retrieve the messages and find the treasure. Then his goal would be to evaluate the communication/interaction between the peers.

I advocate here for a different epistemological strategy of supporting learning: instead of talking of mirroring or guiding systems where the interaction is regulated through computational means, I propose a “coupling system”, where there in no model of correct interaction underneath but the system just stick of the users interactions, offering hooks to relevant information when needed. The system/agent and the humans forms a multi-agent distributed system.

The pictures are taken from: A. U. Frank. Spatial Cognition II (International Workshop on Maps and Diagrammatical Representations of the Environment, Hamburg, August 1999), volume 1849 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, chapter Spatial Communication with Maps: Defining the Correctness of Maps Using a Multi-Agent Simulation, pages 80–99. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2000. [url]

A. U. Frank. Spatial Cognition II (International Workshop on Maps and Diagrammatical Representations of the Environment, Hamburg, August 1999), volume 1849 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, chapter Spatial Communication with Maps: Defining the Correctness of Maps Using a Multi-Agent Simulation, pages 80–99. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2000. [url]

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This paper present an approach to defining the correctness of a map using two agents, one that explore a given real environment and produce a representation of it (literally a map). The second agent reads the map and try to navigate the real space using that information. The interaction between the two agents is logged and measured to track errors in communication, and evalued to proof the Correctness (the success in navigating the environment) and the effectiveness (the size of different representations to communicate the same information) of the map.

Map-maker and map-user can make mistakes in the perception and form erroneus beliefs about the environment. Simulated agents observe the environment and form a set of beliefs about it, which may be incomplete, imprecise or even wrong. The agents can produce artifacts, which represent their knowledge.

The author define then the homomorphism, as the correspondence between the agent’s beliefs and the environments, where objects and operations are set into correspondance.

The ontospace project is focussing in developing spatial ontologies to support human-machine interaction. I would be interested in their methodological approach for the production and refinement of the lexicon and rules of the ontology.

Spatial Cognition is concerned with the acquisition, organization, utilization and revision of knowledge about spatial environments, be it real or abstract, human or machine. Research issues range from the investigation of human spatial cognition to mobile robot navigation. The goal of the SFB/TR 8 is to investigate the cognitive foundations for human-centered spatial assistance systems.

Reinhold Greter has put together a huge collection of links related to LBS and mobile art. It is worth to bookmark. Actually I am going to put it on my del.icio.us.

STAMPS is a little program. It can run on your Mobile phone. Using this program you can see a map of the place where you are, visualised on the screen of your mobile. There, you can write a kind of SMS and attach it to the map so that other friends can see your message appearing on their map. You can write for instance: “this is my preferite pizzeria!”, to offer advice to your buddies. All the messages left in the system say something about the city where you live: what are the sport locations, the place to eat, the meeting spots. After a while, we want to use all these information to help the users to navigate the city. You can ask the system, for instance: “where is a pizzeria near by?”, and the system will search for other people’s messages which refer to the term pizzeria to give you an advice.

craftsrv1.epfl.ch/research/stamps/

Kelle, U. (2004). Qualitative Research Practive, chapter Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis, pages 473–489. SAGE Publications, London. Available from: http://www.sage.co.uk.
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This article makes an overview of the history and current trend in qualitative data analysis. This research field is a mixture of different approach which span from a mere superficial referential analysis to a semi-quantitative coding analysis.

The author makes the difference between qualitative and quantitative coding, explaining that in qualitative research the coding of textual data does not serve to condensate relevant information and to decide whether a certain person or fact falls under a certain class of events or persons, but simply to make sure that all relevant data can be brought to bear on a point. Qualitative codes are not ‘factual codes’ that denote the absence or the existence of certain facts but ‘referential codes’ they serve as signpost that support the identification of relevant text passages an help to make them available for further interpretation and analysis.

Another interesting link was the idea of using co-occuring codes as ‘heuristic devices’, with the objective to investigate the co-occurrence of the codes as an evidence or counter-evidence of a certain hypothesis. In this case there should be the prerequisite of indipendent testing. Slightly, in using this methodology, the approach moves towards a quantitative text analysis.

Last quote: “the validity of data, methods and research results always remains to a extent a matter of trust, regardless of the research methodology the researchers are committed to.”

Finally I managed to spend some time reflecting on the recent discussion about folk taxonomy or folksonomy. Obviously there are lots of disadvantages in leaving a huge freedom to people to pick up their own keyword to describe the content. On the other hand there are people that advocate for a spontaneous rise of a shared meaning. I would adhere to a “middle-earth philosophy”, where context sets the boundaries and the natural alveum to constraint the unleashed meaning of words. In my idea, we cannot expect these discontinuous connections among different network resources to bring towards a huge shared meaning. Vice-versa, we can expect something better from the location based content. The difference I can see between the two resides in the context that is pretty much defined by the geographical space in the latter case.

There I expect to be a certain degree of redundancy that can correct difference in meaning, or at least, can make them more self evident, as a first step towards a consensus.

I am interested in hearing your opinion on this.

Keep having the bloody error of iDVD while trying to generate the image file of the students projects. It seem that the version 4.0 opens by default an NTSC project that even if changed later, keeps some bugs in the file. Lack of compatibility between the 5.0 and the 4.0 because it has to re-encode all the assets. Finally a FAT32 partition on the target disk screws all the process up … this is not good.

On the Good side, I found an interesting program to share the iTunes and the iPhoto library among different users. Also, I set up a shared movies folder that I am accessing with my mod’ed xbox. Supa Cool.

Following Zeno’s advice I tried Taco today and I found it extremely useful. It allows to work with styles and integrates perfectly with CSSEdit. Worth to try:

Taco HTML Edit is free software for Mac OS X. It is designed to simplify the process of creating attractive web sites that render correctly in various browsers. Taco HTML Edit includes tag wizards, which generate HTML markup for you. Taco HTML Edit also helps find errors in your HTML markup, and it can even check spelling in your documents. For those people who use PHP scripts in their development, Taco HTML Edit includes tools for PHP management.

Nicolas, set up a web page with some pictures of the tables done by the students for the cscw course.