This book considers how people talk about their environment, find their way in new surroundings, and plan routes. Leading scholars and researchers in psychology, linguistics, computer science, and geography show how empirical research can be used to inform formal approaches towards the development of intuitive assistance systems.

Accessible to students and researchers from diverse backgrounds Makes a clear connection between language and computational representations in the modelling of space Represents and supports the development of assistance systems for everyday challenges Includes scholars and researchers from around the world

Thora Tenbrink is a Lecturer in Cognitive Linguistics at Bangor University (Wales, UK). She worked for ten years as a research scientist at the Faculty of Linguistics at Bremen University (Germany), and is a principal investigator in two projects in the Collaborative Research Center SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition (Bremen/Freiburg). Her main interest concerns the relationship between cognitive processes and linguistic representations. She is the author of Space, Time, and the Use of Language (Mouton de Gruyter, 2007), and editor, with Kenny Coventry and John Bateman, of Spatial Language and Dialogue (OUP, 2009). Jan Wiener is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Bournemouth (UK). Previously he has worked as a research scientist at the University of Freiburg (Germany), the CNRS (Paris, France), and the Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Cybernetics (Tübingen, Germany). His research focuses primarily on the cognitive processes and strategies that underly navigation and wayfinding behaviour. Christophe Claramunt is a Professor in Computer Science and Chair of the Naval Academy Research Institute in France. He was previously a Senior Lecturer in Computing at the Nottingham Trent University and a Senior Researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University de Bourgogne in France. His main research interests concern theoretical and multi-disciplinary aspects of geographical information science, including spatio-temporal and computational models, alternative models of space, semantic GIS, integration of GIS and simulation systems, and the spatial Web.

Accessible to students and researchers from diverse backgrounds Makes a clear connection between language and computational representations in the modelling of space Represents and supports the development of assistance systems for everyday challenges Includes scholars and researchers from around the world