Car navigation map

Automotive navigation is a vector topographic map with additional attributes of map elements and objects necessary for the effective operation of the navigation system.

Road elements in the navigation map have attributes such as:

• street names;
• house numbers ;
• information about one-way traffic , prohibited turns;
• information on travel restrictions for certain types of transport;
• road class information;
• speed limit on this stretch of road;

The navigation map also has a large number of so-called “significant points” (Points of Interest, POI):

• airports, train stations, ferry crossings;
• restaurants, hotels, supermarkets;
• parking, refueling;

with addresses, phone numbers and other attributes of these objects.

A car navigation map is always developed on the basis of a topographic map of a scale from 1: 10,000 to 1: 25,000 by adding the above attributes and requires constant updating from 3 to 12 months. The main “reader” of the navigation map is the on-board computer of the car (or a portable car navigator). This requires a very specific "programming" navigation map. For example, the geometry of the intersections is drawn taking into account the optimization of the voice prompts of the system. This is a rather complicated process, and in practice all the same up to 10% of the hints are not clear enough without a glance at the navigator screen.

As a rule, the navigation map is edited by professional experts who often do this work directly on the ground. Due to the very high cost of this business, there are only two companies that produce navigation maps of the whole world: Navteq and Tele Atlas . However, this does not prevent the existence of small local navigation map providers in each country (for example, Navitel and the Geocenter in Russia). However, there is a project OpenStreetMap , in which the creation of a map of the whole world is carried out by the efforts of enthusiasts who are not professional cartographers. There are quite a few places for which the quality of maps prepared in the OpenStreetMap project significantly exceeds the quality of maps from professional manufacturers.

Departure of a specialist to each intersection is too complicated and lengthy process. Attempts are being made to partially automate it by using feedback from moving navigation systems connected to the Internet. For example, having found that 100% of navigators are moving in one direction along an ordinary street, we can conclude that this street has become one-way. That is, car navigators can be used as “sensors” of navigation information.

It is for this purpose that Tele Atlas was bought by the manufacturer of TomTom navigators in 2007 (almost immediately after this, the second remaining company, Navteq, was bought by Nokia). This had a negative impact on the market structure - there were no independent navigation map providers left on it. That is, now Garmin should buy cards from its competitor - NOKIA. This created a unique opportunity for the emergence of the third global supplier of navigational charts, because the cost of buying Tele Atlas / Navteq (3 billion euros) indicated in 2007 is ten times higher than the cost of creating a company of the Tele Atlas class (about 300 million euros).

100% coverage with navigation maps has been performed only in a number of economically developed countries. For Russia, no supplier has full coverage. This is due to the fact that in Russia there are no full-fledged source data - the so-called Base Maps - for navigation map companies, namely:

• 100% coverage with topographic maps with a connected graph of roads
• address plans of all localities

At the time of this writing, work on the creation of base maps by Roscartography has not begun.

Due to the absence of these Basemaps, for 2008 the majority of nautical charts in Russia are a complex mixture of maps of different densities, for example:

• in Moscow, the map displays all the streets and courtyards;
• all the streets are represented in the top ten largest million-plus cities;
• in the central areas, the map shows all roads to each village or city, and even to the city (depending on the area);
• in other regions, only federal roads to regional centers are represented.

This approach allows you to provide travel on federal highways throughout the country, possibly with a trip to a particular city, and even (for a dozen major cities) through the city streets. The remaining areas that are not covered by road navigation maps are often filled with “unbroken” maps of scale from 1: 100,000 to 1: 1,000,000, which cannot provide route guidance.

Therefore, to select the right cards, it is necessary to understand that the statement of the supplier “we have covered 100% of the country’s territory” can mean very different levels of detail. Choosing a map is no less important than choosing a navigator model. Moreover, navigation maps from the same supplier are, in most cases, compiled by each manufacturer into its own format. As a result, it turns out that the map update card for BMW will not work with the navigator installed in Mercedes , even if it is the same map from Tele Atlas .

Another problem is the actualization of the map (change accounting) and the introduction of updated data.

• GPS Navigator