Critical issues on digital map databases for land-based navigation and guidance systems: a Canadian perspective

Summary form only given. Digital map databases are considered to be the most important components of land-based navigation and guidance systems. Even when no maps are presented to the users, they are needed for spatial data processing in land-based navigation and guidance systems. Road data coordinates along with road attributes constitute these databases. The size of these databases depend on the underlying road networks and the amount of attributes stored. However, in most cases these databases are very large and are used in many functions of the system. Standardization and fast retrieval are two of the important issues related to these databases. Lack of standardization is one of the leading reasons for not having, yet, cost-effective and widely available land-based navigation and guidance systems. A set of standards that determine the type of road coordinates and attributes along with the format and structure of data is highly needed. The other issue is related to the retrieval of these large databases in real-time. In this paper, these two issues and their treatments along with the current state-of-affairs in digital map databases for navigation and guidance systems in Canada are discussed