European Consortium ActMAP
A European consortium called ActMAP (Actualize Map) is (in their words) "developing standardised mechanisms to update existing map database content and enable dynamic attachment of information to the digital in-vehicle map". The ActMAP consortium comprises ERTICO (coordinator), BMW, CRF Fiat Research Centre, DaimlerChrysler, Navigon, Navteq, Tele Atlas, and Siemens VDO Automotive. They have finished most of their work and published a number of reports, which were submitted to the ISO committee TC204 WG3 for standardization. Their reports serve as a good starting point and reference for the work of this project. An important issue their reports address is dealing with the complexity of multiple map suppliers, using proprietary formats, coupled with multiple data suppliers and multiple versions of in-vehicles maps. They resolve this by using an open intermediate map format expressed with XML and based on the concepts of the ISO standard GDF 4.0. All modifications to a supplier's database are first converted to this intermediate format, stored on a server and then converted to each format used within individual vehicles. They assume that each car has a "baseline" map from a map supplier and that this baseline defines reference identifiers (e.g. map segment ID) for most features to be updated. For features with no reference identifier in the baseline, they propose using a "generic" reference that is discovered heuristically using map matching as described by a proposed standard called AGORA
A major issue not directly addressed by ActMAP is that for each new version of a supplier's map database all reference IDs are usually reassigned by a compiling process, which destroys any correspondence with IDs of previous versions. This seriously interferes with the ability to use incremental updates to generate a new version of a map database from a previous version. Another issue not resolved by ActMAP is the inability to reference and characterize subsections of road segments (for example, curves, hills, maneuver lanes, etc.) in order to update them.
Read more about this topic: Map Database Management
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