Today, Tele Atlas (TA) is releasing a new version of MultiNav, the street network database from the company that is optimized for navigation products and solutions. So, to be clear, though it is not technically a subset of MultiNet, the complete Tele Atlas road network database, MulitNav contains only certain features most applicable for navigation applications. I spoke with Purvi Rajani, Global Product Director for MultiNav, Ms. Rajani said, “The product is analogous to moving from DOS to Windows for us; it’s a massive move forward for Tele Atlas.” She offered several key points to consider in this new release:
- MultiNav is designed for developers and will help them to reduce the time to market for their applications. TA considers this an “out of the box” data set for the application developers.
- Globalization. There are 73 countries of navigable data delivered with MultiNav. Rajani said that many developers want to use one compiler for an entire global database and one global specification for applications that they can offer all over the world. She said that, “MultiNav is our first Unicode product and will support double-byte characters for European applications.”
- A locality index is integrated into MultiNav, which is a pre-built index for geographic boundaries and point data, much like a geographic names look up table. This will allow the develop to move between geographic jurisdictions without having to worry about when one country describes a sub-jurisdiction as a postal code versus a zip code, or a state versus a province, for example.
- Data footprint and size reduction. Rajani said that developers want to reduce their bill of material costs so that the core map is compact in size and will help to save money on processing power or hardware. If the maps take up less space then that allows more storage space for things like POIs or building heights or whatever. TA is achieving the size reduction is by:
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- Network layer – The Network layer contains the street geometry but is reduced in size by eliminating some of the shapepoints to describe features. The layer with the full geometry is shipped with this product also. However, the positional accuracy for generalized network layer is never more than 1 meter different than the full geometry layer.
- Display layer – The display layer contains other features like water polygons, for example. TA will provide a full layer of the land use. Polygon layers will preserve feature continuity even after generalization to make certain that features still connect as they should.
- Optimizing the data specifications and data structure. That is, they have satisfied identifying features with fewer attributes. Just one type of turn restriction for example.
- Geometry will be reduced to two layers and positional accuracy can be generalized without compromising integrity.
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MultiNav is delivered as GDF (specific to automotive applications) file as well as Shapefile.
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