A Method for Linking Road-network Intersections in a Multi-scale Navigable Database

As an important component of ITS (Intelligent Transformation System), the road-network features in navigable database are characterized by multi-scale representations, which means that several representations from the same features in the real world exist synchronously in the database. In the context, the explicit link of these representations from the same features at different scales, especially in the case of the road-network intersections, plays a crucial role in improving query efficiencies and reducing data redundancies during the process of route planning and navigation, the process of linking road-network intersections is one of the most important and complex process in building multi-scale navigable databases. From the viewpoint of Geo-scientists, establishing link can basically be seen as a matching problem, but it works well only in the case of those objects at the similar scale, objects of different scales, however, are too difficult to match directly. Based on the description of key problems in links between representations of road intersections at different level of detail, this paper considers that this kind of link can be performed based on object spatial aggregation approach. Thus, before the matching itself, the semantic relations, especially the aggregation relation between multiple representations, have to be probed. By use of matching criterions, such as attribute, topological, geometrical matching technologies, the links between representations from the same road-network intersections can be established explicitly. In this context, a case in point is given for describing the strategies of linking road network intersections in detail.