10 May 2014

Math Makes Mobile Maps Meaningful

Due to the success of navigation devices and smartphones, digital maps are used widely in everyday life. They guide us safely along motorways or to the next bakery as long as the map is good and clear. However, representation of many information items on small, mobile screens is not trivial. At the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), computer scientists have now developed a method to ensure mathematically optimal adaptation of the labeling to the perspective and driving direction. Researchers, focus on mathematically exactly geovisualization.


By means of the mathematical description of digital maps, the difficulty of the problem can be estimated first. For example, maximization of the number of labelings in the selected image section of the navigation device along a route is one of the mathematical problems, the so-called NP-complete problems that require most of the computing time. When increasing the number of objects in the map, the required computing capacity grows exponentially and computing capacity quickly reaches its limits, especially on mobile devices.

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