Conflation of National Bridge Inventory Database with Tiger- Based Road Vectors

The National Bridge Inventory (NBI) database provides detailed bridge information with full coverage in the United States. In the database, each bridge record has an associated geographic location, which makes it possible to match the NBI records with road vectors in a geospatial database. This paper presents our approach to conflating the NBI database with U.S. Census Bureau's Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) road vectors based on a point-to-line matching algorithm, which combines both geometric and semantic similarity measurements. Experiments have shown that most NBI bridges can be successfully matched to TIGER road vectors with an overall success rate over 80%. The matched results are then used to help define linear features for bridges in the road database. The resultant road databases have enhanced bridge information and are further used in creating a 3D road database. The proposed methodology has been fully implemented and has been used in various applications. * Corresponding author