Place making is an urban formalization of individual communities. It also connects with social functions and emotional communication of inhabitants. This paper argues that some traditional perspectives of place making, Kevin Lynch (1960, 1972, 1984)’s the five elements of the urban image and Christopher Alexander (1977)’s pattern language for urban design, is necessary to revise nowadays accord with the digital era. We bring up a novel concept for place making on virtual environment: the establishment of a place does not come from the designers or planners, does not come from the inhabitants, but come from the others whose have experienced this place and sharing their feeling through the virtual environment such as the collaborative tagging (O’Reilly, 2005; Golder and Huberman, 2006; Schmitz, 2006) i.e. social tagging service. 

The significant problem of this paper is how can we perform this idea and let it useful in design aspect? For this problem, we assume all spatial features of a place are fragmental and incomplete but could be recordable and retrieval by digital media. We develop a spatial framework called Spatial Intention as the metadata to solve the recording problem of abstract feeling. 

Spatial Intention is used to represent spatial experience of a particular person and ambience awareness into some spatial depicts at that physical place. The meaning of “intention” is implied into a sequential relation when a navigator moves and gazes something at a place. This sequential relation can be described into three ways of spatial representation: one is the action of human body including “moving the body” and “moving the head”; one is converting the visual information into spatial memories through the behavior of gaze, including “the sight focus” and “the snapshot glance”; the other one is that we consider the limitation of topology at that physical place called "the main identity". In Summary, we regard Spatial Intention as the action Tagging and consider that it is a suitable framework of representation for place making.

A social network platform is supported by distributed environment, to integrate the collected information from a place and gather the fragment pieces as one through the framework of Spatial Intention. For implementation, we used the algorithm of image processing Kohonen Self-organizing Map (KSM) to extract the features of place. The Map is recordable in XML documents. The mechanism “d-separation” in a Bayesian classifier is used to analyze these extracted features from XML documents and could show the results of body experience in a place. We performed this system on a project of spatial experience with Taiwanese traditional garden, the Lin family garden in Banciao, Taipei County, Taiwan.

The significance of this paper is we consider that the place making in virtual environment could be as a tagging process that people navigate around a place and share their experience as tags on social network platform, then the designer who want to know an integral impression of somewhere can be triggered through these tags and grasp the useful information. We will discuss more about this process further.
 
Reference
Alexander, C., S. Ishikawa and M. Silverstein: 1977, A Pattern Language, Oxford University Press, New York.
Golder, S. and B. A. Huberman: 2006, Usage Patterns of Collaborative Tagging Systems. Journal of Information Science 32(2): 198-208.
Lynch, K.: 1960, The Image of the City, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Lynch, K.: 1972, What Time is This Place? MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Lynch, K.: 1984, Reconsidering the Image of the City, in  R. M. Hollister (ed.),  Cities of the Mind: Image and Themes of the city in the social science, Plenum Press, New York, pp. 151-161. 
O'Reilly, T.:  2005, What Is Web 2.0, from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
Schmitz, P.: 2006, Inducing ontology from flickr tags, In Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop in WWW2006, Edinburgh, Scotland.