Representing Topological Relationships by Using 3D objects: An Empirical Survey

International audience; In this paper we present a survey conducted in order to understand how simple 3D objects, named geometaphors, can be arranged for building a model permitting to represent topological relationships in a threedimensional space. The research was conducted on twenty participants who were familiar with geographical information systems (GIS) and the notion of topological relationship. The users participating to the survey were asked to put in relation textual labels related to topological relationships with visual arrangements of geometaphors pairs. While the results of the survey often show a convergence towards specific associations, in other cases users indicate a set of associations complementary to the main choice. Therefore, in order to reduce the ambiguity, the anwsers to the survey were filtered with a set of rules that take into consideration the priority of the relationships, the category of the geometaphors and the order they are selected; the result is an interpretation model of the visual arrangements that takes into account all the answers and, in particular, takes advantage of the set of complementary associations when the primary ones can’t be applied because they are not congruent with certain categories of geometries. Such model represents an important component for the building of visual query environments compliant with the users’ mental model, contributing therefore to augment significantly the usability of such systems.