Standards for Navigable Databases: A Progress Report

SAE's Database Standards Task Group is addressing digital street map databases to support vehicle navigation. The initial work of the Task Group is to develop a descriptive “truth-in-labeling” standard to permit database vendors to consistently and accurately describe their products and to permit application developers to match available databases to their needs. The truth-in-labeling standard consists of definitions to identify database entities, metrics to provide scales against which entity quality can measured, and tests to score the entities along metrics. The general classes of entities being considered are nodes (e.g., roadway intersections), links (e.g., roadway segments), and regions (e.g., cities, parks, shopping malls, etc.). Among the issues being considered are: how to facilitate broadcasts of traffic information to vehicles using navigable databases; approaches to dealing with roads with multiple names; roadway classifications; and coordination with similar efforts in other parts of the world.