Poster: An Approach for Supporting of Navigation of Blind People in Public Building Based on Hierarchical Map Ontology

Dariusz Mikulowski, Marek Pilski

Abstract: The blind people encounters great difficulties with independent movement in unknown environment. However, navigation in open outside space is partially supported due to their ability to hear of sound reflected from obstacles, therefore movement across the unknown areas of public buildings is even harder. There are also various helping systems i.e. inbuilt physical items, such as the metal paths leading to important places or round protrusions are applied. But the installation of such support is usually too expensive. Therefore it is a great need of easier electronic supporting of navigation of blind people in public buildings. In this paper, a concept of specially developed hierarchical object map ontology is proposed. All objects in this ontology can be physically labeled by radio labels (i.e. bluetooth) and have description of their characteristic features such as their attributes and relationships. Due to this, the routes between two any objects will be easy to create.