Quick presentation

I'm a PhD student working at the French Naval Academy Research Institute in the Geographical Information Science group. I'm working on the formalization of a verbal description of an environnemental scene in order to geolocalise the observer. Research interests : landscape perception, cognition, verbal description, spatial ontology, spatial model.

Research

Context : The study of cognitive processes has raised fundamental questions such as how is spatial knowledge acquired by people ? what is the nature of people's internal representation of space ? or how does the language people use to communate affect their ability to deal effectively with spatial information ? The results of research on these fundamental questions resulted on a change on the way geographical informations should be apprehended. However, landscape descriptions are not satisfactory represented by current geographical models. In particular, there is still a need for semantic models that provide a bridge between perception of landspaces and GIS.

Objectives : our objective is to provide a data-procesing and spatial model of a natural landscape based on the description of an observer, and at least to localise the landscape and, as a consequence, the observer.

Main notions

First results : we have provided a structural categorisation and representation of a verbal description of a natural landscape made by an observer. The verbal description is the result of the perception of a natural environment of an observer (no assertions are made on the background of this observer). The model illustrates the spatial, relational and semantic constructs that emerge from the verbal descriptions. It is a support for cross-cultural studies of cognitive processes, and particularly for the comparison between experts and non-experts, or young and old persons. The model also helps for the identification of landscapes as it reflects the rhythm of space in the verbal description.

The proposed modelling should provide a support for the development of a manipulation language (i.e., spatial and rhythm-based operators). Current work concerns the development of a mapping between our modelling approach and a GIS-based representation.

Word cloud

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Word cloud