There should be a computational model around the PhD topic. This is a fundamental requisite for doing the doctorate at EPFL. There may be different directions in which this can happen:

1. cognitive modeling (building an agent) [obsolete because of distributed cognition]
– modeling interaction
– modeling cognition

2. types of interaction when you build a map together?

3. Simulation of human interaction

4. Ontology (ContextML): formal ontology for describing a context. -> relation between the context and the message.

5. Model of argumentation in map editing -> if you where to define the map editing as a game what would be the rules??

The Green Map System (GMS) brings a locally adaptable framework into many hands. It invites design teams of all ages and backgrounds to create a Green Map by charting urban areas in a manner that illuminates the interconnections between the natural and designed environments. Utilizing GMS’s shared visual language, our collaboratively designed set of engaging Icons that symbolize the different kinds of urban green sites and cultural resources, Mapmakers are independently producing unique, regionally flavored images that fulfill local needs, yet have a global linkage.

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The following map is cropped on the Green map of Temple Bar, Dublin.

I have been thinking recently about the research question for my work. Many different aspects of spatialised communication can be highlighted. The core concept is that people use space for living and use referential aspect of space while communicating for maximizing communication functions. No big surprise here. Non trivial aspects of this can be how a group of people reaches a shared representation of space while physically non co-present. This may mean that people can define space asynchronously or either through a virtual media. The three distinctive elements of this work may be:
1. the group cognitive processes;
2. the mental representation of space;
3. the sharing of reference and direction elements over mediated communication.

Dr. Alexander Kippel is a Postdoctoral research associate a the University of Bremen, Germany. He works in the cognitive systems group and his interests are Spatial Cognition, Wayfinding, Chorems, Conceptual and Spatial Information Experimental Cartography.

He wrote a thesis on Wayfinding Chorems: conceptualising wayfinding ans route direction elements.

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How people co-construct a shared representation of space?

The cool/hot aspects of “spatialised communication” I can see so far can be so resumed:
a) catching inferences: building a framework to detect when and how people use spatial references to speed up the communication and problem solving process.
b) space meaning: what is the meaning of a place? [P. Durish: place and space]
c) space grounding: how is the groundign process different if people communicate with electronic media with/without spatial information? How is Mutual Modelling different?
d) social navigation: how is social navigation different because of space inferences?

In conclusion the topic is still undefined but maybe I can try to combine these theme to get to an interesting and unexplored topic.

M. Tuters. The locative commons: Situating location-based media in urban public space. In Futuresonic 04 proceedings, Manchester, April 27th – May 2nd 2004.
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Immanuel Kant (1790): it is not through received norms that we develop ‘judgment’, the critical foundation of cosmopolitan ethics, but in the confrontation of new ideas.

This article contains a bunch of interesting links and quotes which are reported in an unordered manner. The central claim of the article is not clear. However some interesting ideas emerge. One of them is a claim raised by Ben Russell: a collective urban form can potentially emerge from the collective action of essentially selfish actors, coordinated though an intelligent system, perhaps even the basis for a new social contract of selectively accessible self-centered utopias.

Two interesting links are the Open-source architecture by Dennis Kaspori
The superstudio idea, by Peter Lang
Lost dimension, by Paul Virilio

Seed Spaces is a project which was initiated in Gent Belgium during the Communectivity Workshop held at the Voorhuit. Bringing together the tradition of allotment gardeners growing vegetables beside the train tracks, and the abundant spring growth evident between the paving stones in the urban centre of Gent, the project proposes the city as a utopic space, and builds a community of urban space dwellers through a simple action with ongoing effects. Seedspace gardeners are encouraged to make connections between places of plantings and other gardeners, with the ability to feed their stories back through the collective space of the website. Below is a map of the first seed plantings. We hope you continue to plant seeds and connect communities through the cracks of the cities.

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…is a round-robin, massively multiplayer street photography game taking place all over New York City starting May 13, as part of the Psy.Geo.Conflux festival. Sign up, grab your camera, challenge other players and help us create an emergent visual index of NYC!

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I was thinking to some way to put together a good application for experiencing with the annotated space thing. Some ideas:

1. it should be very light
2. it should be portable
3. I may use an SVG viewer for the J2ME like TinyLine, hook it with a server providing a great SVG map of the place I want to use, then I need just some extra coding to implement the extra authoring functionality and that’s it.
4. I need eventually an SVG map server like this one: http://www.carto.net/projects/open_svg_mapserver/.

So far I can see three interesting directions for my PhD topic in the field of Spatialised Communication:

(a)- spatial inferences: how people use spatial inferences to restructure their work activity? How can we support this process?
(b)- spatial psycholinguistics: how space restructure and is being restructured by language? How can we facilitate these concepts to support teamwork and learning at large?
(c)- spatial opinion forming: how people form their mental representation of space? How they come to give a meaning to places? How can we support this opinion forming process?

Please send me comments ….