SYSTEM FOR DETERMINING A ROUTE AND PRESENTING NAVIGATIONAL INSTRUCTIONS THEREFOR

摘要

A system for determining a route and presenting navigational instructions therefor preferably includes a plurality of map records including a plurality of business records each identifying a business, a plurality of street records each identifying a street, and a plurality of node records each identifying a node. The system preferably further includes a computation module adapted to execute an algorithm for determining a route between a source location and a destination location using at least one of the map records. The algorithm is preferably adapted to manipulate a graph representation having vertices and edges, wherein each of the vertices corresponds to a respective one of the streets, each of the streets corresponds to exactly one of the vertices, each node corresponds to at least one of the edges, and each edges corresponds to exactly one node. The algorithm can be biased to discover the simplest path (minimum number of street changes) that traverses the minimum physical distance. The computation module preferably interacts with a user during the determination of the route to present a status of the determination to the user and/or to respond to a request of the user, such as a request to terminate the determination. The system preferably further includes a presentation module that generates and presents natural language navigational instructions for traversing the route.