Place Representation as a Prerequisite to Place Communication

Places can hardly be formally represented in such way that their qualities can be experienced from the representation itself. Places are therefore currently largely inaccessible to formal methods, which is one of the reasons why Platial Information Theories and Platial Information Systems do not yet exist. This paper discusses the possibilities that a shift to a communication perspective offers in terms of a better understanding of platial information. In particular, it argues for the need to create a corpus of place representations to study them empirically. Such a corpus can be expected to facilitate a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that are effective when representing places as well as how place representations can be transformed into other place representations.