Enrichment of topographic road database for the purpose of routing and navigation

With growing demand on multi-purpose or multi-modal navigation, the route calculation needs to traverse semantically enriched road networks for different transportation modes. Currently, operational route planning algorithms reveal rather limited performances or their potential for comprehensive applications are constrained by the unavailable or insufficient interoperation among the underlying geo-data that are separately maintained in different spatial databases. To overcome this limitation, a novel approach has been proposed to integrate the routing-relevant information from different data sources, which involves three processes: (1) automatic matching to identify the corresponding road objects between different datasets; (2) interaction to refine the automatic matching result; and (3) transferring the routing-relevant information from one data-set to another. In process (1), the Delimited Stroke Oriented algorithm is employed to achieve the automatic data matching between different datasets, which has revealed a high matching rate and certainty. However uncertain matching problems occur in areas where topological conditions are too complicated or inconsistent. The remaining unmatched or wrongly matched objects are treated in process (2), with the help of a series of interaction tools. On the basis of refined matching results after the interaction, process (3) is dedicated to automatic integration of the routing-relevant information from different data sources.