Experiential hierarchies of streets

Mental representations of spatial knowledge are organized hierarchically. Among people familiar with an urban environment, common spatial knowledge from these spatial mental representations enables successful communication of place and route descriptions, consisting of hierarchically-ordered references to prominent spatial features, such as streets. The more prominent a street is, the more likely it is to be known by the wayfinder receiving the directions. The automated construction of such descriptions therefore requires hierarchical data models ranking streets in street networks. This paper explores the reasons of overlaps in the content and hierarchical organization of common spatial knowledge among locals. We introduce a novel measure allowing to rank streets in a street network. This ranking allows to construct experiential hierarchies reflecting the shared experience of the streets in a city. The measure is derived from network connectivity measures, and takes into account the structure of the street network as well as the higher-order partition of the urban space into suburbs. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.