Minimising pedestrian navigational ambiguities through geoannotation and temporal tagging

The increasing power and ubiquity of smart devices such as mobile phones and PDAs means that a visitor to a city now carries with them a device capable of giving location-specific guiding and routing information. Whilst there have been a number of studies on the use of photographs to supplement text and map-based guiding applications for mobile devices, in this paper we want to propose and give an initial exploratory study of a guiding system that utilises geoannotation to mark photographs. In geoannotation, each photograph is selected from a repository of photographs based on the content and its relevance to the route. The photograph itself is then geoannotated with arrows and other markers on the fly so as to give routing information. Because the photograph in the database will not be taken from the location of the visitor who needs routing information, we need to take care and design cues that are unambiguous. The main contribution of this paper is the discussion of the geoannotation technique, and some informal results from pilot trials on how it helps in addressing certain navigational ambiguities arising in the use of photographs in pedestrian navigation systems.