New Location Description Edit Feature for Traffic Operators Improves Data Quality

One of the most significant challenges for organizations who create traffic information data is to create a message that is clearly understood by two quite diverse users; people and devices.

When creating the message for devices, such as navigation systems, it is critical that the incident must be precisely referenced by both location and event type in order to properly process and display the traffic event. The terminology used for the location should match the actual map data used, even though the text of this location may be cumbersome or different from local naming conventions.

However, when creating a message for people, such as for broadcast or to be viewed on websites or mobile devices, the data that is automatically generated from these same map databases can be confusing and does not often take into account localized names.

GEWI has recently solved this problem with the new TIC feature “Location Description Editor” (LDE). This feature allows a TIC user to modify the default location’s Result description to include text that is more easily understood by the end user. The LDE feature can also be used in cases where the underlying map data may have missing or erroneous data which, if not corrected, would lead to the distribution of inaccurate or misleading traffic data.



As shown in the image (above), once an event location is created, the user is able to select the individual elements of the location description they would like to modify.

To make changes, the user simply selects the element they would like to modify, then modify the text of the selected element, and the result is updated to include the corrected, “people friendly” text, while the source data remains intact.

Most importantly, all of the underlying location information, (TIC3 location, TMC location, lat/long, etc.) remains unchanged so it may be properly processed by navigation devices or other systems.



Note that the blue “person icon” is now present in the result window to alert the operator that this text was created or modified by a person, rather than the system.

In the future, TIC will be able to track changes which have been made to correct erroneous map data. This data could then be provided to 3rd party map data providers, to help improve their map data product.

For more information about the TIC LDE feature contact holger.kuske@gewi.com.
GEWI at Intertraffic Amsterdam 2014
GEWI Business Workshop Results in Positive Outlook for 2014