Developing an interactions ontology for characterising pedestrian movement behaviour

Since the introduction of Time Geography, the literature has witness a growing interest in representing and understanding human movement and its relationship with the environment. Although recent technology in personal tracking devices brought new potentialities in collecting and representing individual movements, methods to deal with the complexity and dynamism of collective movements are still lacking. This chapter introduces a spatial knowledge representation for the conceptualisation of pedestrian movement as a complex system based on the interactions. Movement interactions are defined and classified to represented global characteristics of the movement as emergent properties other than as a set of individual properties. The devised approach is exemplified through a case study on characterizing visitor behaviour in the Dwingelderveld National Park in The Netherlands.