An Affordance-Based Model of Place in GIS

People deal with places in their everyday lives. Interactions with places are based on the meaning people assign to them. In order to integrate the concept of place into geographic information systems (GIS), places have to be modeled. This paper presents a methodology to model places with affordances. Affordances are what objects or things offer people to do with them. Our methodology of modeling places with affordances integrates cognitive and engineering aspects, therefore leading to a knowledge-representation that comes closer to the user. An example is used to show the applicability of the model. Our conclusion is that the integration of affordancebased models of places into future GIS will lead to a better communication between users and systems. 1. Introduction People from a variety of disciplines lament the general erosion of a "sense of place" (Boyer 1996; Sorkin 1991; McCullough 1996). While great energy has been devoted to reflecting on and measuring the specific effects of...