Abstract
With the advent of location-aware smartphones, the desire for pedestrian-based navigation services has increased. Unlike car-based services where instructions generally are comprised of distance and road names, pedestrian instructions should instead focus on the delivery of landmarks to aid in navigation. OpenStreetMap (OSM) contains a vast amount of geospatial information that can be tapped into for identifying these landmark features. This paper presents a prototype navigation service that extracts landmarks suitable for navigation instructions from the OSM dataset based on several metrics. This is coupled with a short comparison of landmark availability within OSM, differences in routes between locations with different levels of OSM completeness and a short evaluation of the suitability of the landmarks provided by the prototype. Landmark extraction is performed on a server-side service, with the instructions being delivered to a pedestrian navigation application running on an Android mobile device.
Highlights
In recent years with the advent of mobile devices, which are connected to the Internet and have GPS functionality, more and more people are making use of routing and navigation services, which are available whenever and wherever they are
Whereas car-based navigation applications tend to focus on distances and street names/numbers, pedestrians generally use landmarks to navigate from one place to another
As a short investigation into the landmarks that are being detected by the service, some routing instructions were obtained from participants and the information compared with the instructions obtained for the same routes via the navigation service
Summary
In recent years with the advent of mobile devices, which are connected to the Internet and have GPS functionality, more and more people are making use of routing and navigation services, which are available whenever and wherever they are. Mainstream routing services such as Google, Bing and MapQuest, still (at the time of writing) use pedestrian navigation instructions similar to those found in car navigation systems Can this be problematic in cases where users are not good at judging distances or the street names used are occluded, a poor GPS signal can indicate to the user that they are far from the intended turn even after they may have already passed it. The apparent availability of both geographical and semantic information contained within OSM makes it a prime candidate for containing information about features that could be seen as landmarks The use of this dataset for such a landmark identification task is the topic of the investigation presented here. The focus of this paper is the description of a prototype currently being developed for a pedestrian-based navigation service and the methods used within it Within this service, the identification of suitable landmarks for delivery in routing instructions has been the primary research focus.
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