Whereas originally the term Navigation applies to the process of directing a ship to a destination, Navigation research deals with fundamental aspects of navigation in general. It can be defined as "The process of determining and maintaining a course or trajectory to a goal location" (Franz, Mallot, 2000). It concerns basically all moving agents, biological or artificial, autonomous or remote-controlled. There are several traditions of navigation. ... An agent is an autonomous entity with an ontological commitment and agenda of its own. ... Biology is the branch of science dealing with the study of life. ... Autonomy is the condition of something that does not depend on anything else. ...
Franz and Mallot proposed a navigation hierarchy (Robotics and Autonomous Systems 30 (2000), 133-153):
Behavioural prerequisite
Navigation competence
Local navigation
Search
Goal recognition
Finding the goal without active goal orientation
Direction-following
Align course with local direction
Finding the goal from one direction
Aiming
Keep goal in front
Finding a salient goal from a catchment area
Guidance
Attain spatial relation to the surrounding objects
Finding a goal defined by its relation to the surroundings
Way-finding
Recognition-triggered response
Association sensory pattern-action
Following fixed routes
Topological navigation
Route integration, route planning
Flexible concatenation of route segments
Survey navigation
Embedding into a common reference frame
Finding paths over novel terrain
There are two basic methods for navigation:
Egocentric navigation also known as Idiothetic navigation
Allocentric navigation also known as Allothetic navigation
This paper explores the implications of rudimentary requirements for effective view navigation, namely that, despite the vastness of an information structure, the views must be small, moving around must not take too many steps and the route to any target be must be discoverable.
Navigation is a limited metaphor for hypermedia and website use that potentially constrains our understanding of human-computer interaction.
In the present paper we trace the emergence of the navigation metaphor and the empirical analysis of navigation measures in usability evaluation before suggesting an alternative concept to consider: shape.
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