Sensing Landscape History with an Interactive Location Based Service

Abstract

This paper introduces the STEAD approach for interpreting data acquired by a “human sensor”, who uses an informal interactive location-based service (iLBS) to sense cultural-historic facts and anecdotes of, and in the landscape. This user-generated data is collected outdoors and in situ. The approach consists of four related facets (who, what, where, when). Three of the four facets are discussed and illustrated by user generated data collected during a Dutch survey in 2008. These data represent the personal cultural-historic knowledge and anecdotes of 150 people using a customized iLBS for experiencing the cultural history of a landscape. The “who” facet shows three dominant mentality groups (cosmopolitans, modern materialists and post modern hedonists) that generated user content. The “what” facet focuses on three subject types of pictures and four picture framing classes. Pictures of the place type showed to be dominant and foreground framing class was slightly favourite. The “where” facet is explored via density, distribution, and distance of the pictures made. The illustrations of the facets indirectly show the role of the “human sensor” with respect to the domain of interest. The STEAD approach needs further development of the when-facet and of the relations between the four facets. Finally the results of the approach may support data archives of iLBS applications.

Keywords

• human sensor
• informal interactive Location Based Services
• photo classification
• sensing cultural-historic objects
• spatial density
• STEAD approach