Collaborative Map Generation – Survey and Architecture Proposal

In this chapter, we intend to present the map making state-of-the-art and discuss current and future prospects for the development of an automated methodology for map aggregation that takes into account the need for integration of mobility data and the social networking trend, which we believe will eventually become the main source of geographical maps. This will allow us to abstract a general architecture for a Collaborative Map Generation System and discuss in some detail the technical challenges for each module (and its current solutions). In doing so, we hope to show that as a very relevant and desirable ‘side effect’, a set of algorithms must be developed that will help with regard to those Transport and Urban management tasks referred to above. We address filtering, map matching, update and aggregation, steps for the construction of the maps, and some efficient algorithms and data structures that are used to compress, process and query the map once generated.