The Coral project is concerned with the automatic generation of route descriptions. Our goal is to develop techniques that can take route plans, such as those you might find on a web site like Whereis.Com.Au or in an in-car navigation system, and produce better descriptions of those routes.
Our conviction is that the simple turn-by-turn instructions typically delivered by these services are less than optimal. Our approach is to use techniques from the fields of natural language generation and intelligent information presentation to improve upon what's currently available.
We're also exploring how route descriptions are best delivered on small mobile devices such as phones and PDAs; this requires not only rendering techniques that are tailored to the physical characteristics of these devices, but also a recognition that navigation assistance is just as important on foot as it is when driving, and different methods for providing route descriptions are needed in each case.