As I am working on my PhD report I decided to include a little drawing that makes the timeline a bit more visual. Three phases will be required to achieve the thesis’ goals: (a) the observation of people communicating using the designed application; (b) the refinement of the retrieval engine that could sustain this kind of communication; (c) the validation of this model through a second experimental phase.

(a) Phase I: The observation of communication. This part of research should last 6 months: an experimental group of users will be gathered for providing experimental data to the framework. The results of this enquiry will be analysed to serve the development of the second phase. The data collected during this phase will be compared with those collected with alternative systems like Urban Tapestries (Q1 on figure).

(b) Phase II: The computational algorithm. The observation of phase I will provide some clues on the nature of this kind of spatial communication like the connection of semantic and geometry of the messages. Together with side experiments on the semantic retrieval engines (Experiment 2 on figure), this will suggest a possible mechanism to sustain this kind of communication that will be implemented in this phase.

(c) Phase III: The verification. Finally, during the last phase the retrieval system implemented during the second phase will be evaluated with two experimental group of users. The phase three might interleave during the 6 months of phase I (Experiment 1 continued on figure).