An automatic approach to integrate routing-relevant information from different resources

With the growing demand on multi-purpose or multi-modal navigation, the route calculation becomes more and more complex. The currently operational route planning algorithms reveal rather limited performances due to unavailable or insufficient interoperation among the underlying datasets that are separately maintained in different spatial databases. This paper introduces an operational approach to integrate routing-relevant information from different data sources. It involves three processes: (a) automatic matching to identify the corresponding road objects between different datasets; (b) interaction to refine the result of automatic matching; and (c) transferring the routing-relevant information from one dataset to another. In process (a), our Delimited Stroke Oriented (DSO) algorithm is employed to achieve the automatic data matching. It 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 (b) with the help of a series of our interaction tools plugged in Arc GIS 9.0. On the basis of the refined matching results, process (c) is dedicated to automatic integration of the routing-relevant information from different data sources. In large test areas from a number of federal states in Germany, the proposed automatic approach has been successfully applied to transfer the routing-relevant information from the dataset of Tele Atlas to DLM De. The enriched DLM De thus gains added value for route calculations.