Newsletter

When a single physical road network is represented by more than one digital road network, and data are available on each of the digital networks, it is necessary to determine how the digital networks are correlated to fulfil the full potential of combining the data. When data referenced to positions or segments on one network need to be re-referenced to corresponding positions or segments in the other network, a coupling table will tell how to perform the conversion. The process of calculating coupling tables, i.e. matching digital networks to each other, has been given different name tags. Some call it conflation or network mapping, we call it netmatching.

With more than a decade of customer projects and applications asking for extremely high precision and coverage requirements, we have frequently had the need to perform netmatching, and hence  we have implemented a tool for exactly this. With unprecedented automation degree (above 99.5 %, dependent on digital network quality and applied robustness measures) and an automated quality assurance process, based on machine learning, we can provide the best possible coupling tables for almost any pair of networks corresponding to the same physical road network.

Let us do your netmatching

If you need a coupling table between two digital networks, you may simply follow the steps below:

1. Provide us with the two networks in a structured format (KML, Shapefile, OSM pbf, etc.)
2. Tell us specific metadata property interpretation, like traversal direction, type of traffic, road class. We will probably be able to figure these out for ourselves, but your input will ensure the best results possible
3. Specify reference requirements for the digital segments in the result file
4. Leave the rest to us

Quality Assurance

When your netmatching is done, you may want to assess the quality of the results. We can help you with this, even if the netmatching was not done by us. Some of the headlines with the quality assessment ar given in the list below:

• Geometry based automatic coupling quality assessment
• Road class quality measure aggregation
• Fully automatic issue detection and prioritization, even also road class sensitive, may be provided with the assessment
• Eyes-on specialist inspection, hint generation, and configuration adaptation is available. These will help improve the results of future netmatches 
• Report with detailed information on findings and conclusions on the netmatching can be provided with the result of the assessment

Try it out!

If you have a source network with a combined segment length of less than 10 km, and a target network for the corresponding area with less than 100 km combined segment length, you are welcome to send them to us. We will make a fast initial netmatching and provide you with a visualization of the match and the corresponding coupling table. If for some reason our netmatch tool does not provide satisfying results, we will estimate the amount of work necessary to improve these. Often quality of the results depend on preprocessing of the digital networks, and this functionality depends highly on the nature of the networks involved.