MapVizard

Today, GDF is a worldwide industry standard for exchanging large geographic data. Within a decade, the former research format GDF format has evolved from a basic research state to a professional standard. Many commercial map providers support and promote the GDF format.

Map data exchange files are very huge and complex, especially GDF.  A navigable map of a mid-size European country can easily allocate 4 GB and more space. In order to read and process GDF files, professional GIS software is needed. And, having an inhouse GIS engineer might help as well. To visualize, inspect and validate GDF files you do not need heavy GIS tools anymore: here's OneStepAhead's MapVizard.

Unified Mapping

OneStepAhead has many years experience in compiling and rendering digital maps for both web-based and mobile usage. With UMDB we offer one of the most efficient, highly flexible and high-quality map processing framework that is available today.

Using our UMDB framework, a digital map is first imported into the UMDB database which then represents a unified, normalized and loss-free view on the source format. Each source requires a customized and highly optimized import tool. UMDB exporters are used to create standard or customized map formats directly from the UMDB database. Each output format requires a specific export tool. Both the import and export tools use the Feature Catalog to map features and attributes from different source.

Map Matching

In order to show a vehicle's position on a digital street map you have to match it's coordinates received from a global positioning system on top of a the used map. Since both the user's location and the underlying road network is not 100% accurate, you have to "snap" the location obtained from e.g. a GPS receiver to the nearest node or edge in the vector map. This computation intensive process is called Map Matching.

OneStepAhead can offer high performance map matching algorithms both on embedded devices and server based batch processing. Our algorithms and modules have been used and approved in the German road pricing project Electronic Toll Collect.