Map distribution server for automotive navigation systems, map data distribution system, and road difference data production method

摘要

Automotive navigation map data has a multilevel structure in which links have a relationship of association with one another among the minutest level and upper levels that are different from the minutest level in scale. A lowermost-level translation unit uses as original data items old and new RDB-form map data items of the minutest level to produce RDB-form difference data of the minutest level. An upper-level difference translation unit produces CSV-format data of a difference of each of the levels of the multilevel structure on the basis of CSV-format data, into which the difference data of the minutest level is translated, and information on the relationship of association among the links of the upper and lower levels in the automotive navigation map data, and integrates the difference data items as final map difference data for an automotive navigation map.

主权项

1. A map distribution server that produces automotive navigation map data for automotive navigation systems, comprising:
a lowermost-level difference translation unit; and an upper-level difference translation unit, wherein an automotive navigation map is represented by network data in which roads are expressed with links and intersections are expressed with nodes; automotive navigation map data has a multilevel structure in which the links are associated with one another among a minutest level and a plurality of other levels which are different from the minutest level in scale; the automotive navigation map data includes minutest-level map data representing links of the minutest level and other-levels map data representing links of each of the plurality of other levels; the lowermost-level difference translation unit is configured to produce relational database (RDB)-form difference data of the minutest level from RDB-form original data items including old and new map data items of the minutest level, the produced RDB-form difference data of the minutest level representing difference between the old data items of the minutest level and the new data items of the minutest level; and the upper-level difference translation unit is configured to:
translate the difference data of the minutest level into translated data,produce difference data of each of levels of the multilevel structure that are related to the difference data of the minutest level, on the basis of the translated data and information on a relationship of association among the links of upper and lower of the levels of the automotive navigation map data,integrate the produced difference data, andproduce, based on the integrated difference data, final map difference data for the automotive navigation map; and the server is configured to control an automotive navigation system to update an automotive navigation map based on the final difference data.