An Iterative Process for Matching Network Data Sets with Different Level of Detail

Nowadays, car navigation systems are widely used in many countries, which in turn has given rise to the production of many road network data sets. In Korea, there are two principal road networks—the Navi-Network produced by navigation systems companies; and the Traffic-Network maintained by the government for traffic information services. In order for the users of the Navi-Network to have access to the traffic information reported by the Traffic-Network, the two systems must be compatible with each other. However, the procedures to enhance compatibility are not particularly easy to carry out because each system is produced for different purposes and has a different level of detail (LOD). In this paper, an iterative process was proposed to match the nodes and links of the two road network data sets with different LOD. We first found the ‘node matching pairs’ based on their locations and the shapes of the links connected to them. We then found the ‘link matching pairs’ using our findings on the node matching. Next, considering the topological relationships of the nodes as delineated from the previous step, we matched the previously unmatched links and nodes in turn. This step was performed iteratively, and at the end of every stage of iteration, similarity values between the two matched datasets were computed. When we discovered the stage with the best similarity value, the results of that stage were regarded as the most appropriate. Finally, the proposed process was applied to the real road network datasets and the results were analyzed. * Corresponding Author.