NAVTEQ Finishes Mapping Finland

location based services

I know that you have all been dying for this, but rest easy as NAVTEQ has now mapped Finland 100%. It’s another example of the mapping wars to bring better maps to your GPS. NAVTEQ does a better job elsewhere and TeleAtlas is improving in the US. Battle on I say and make life better for us all.
NAVTEQ has achieved another milestone in their plans for 100% complete Detailed Coverage of Western Europe. With the Q2/06 release of complete Detailed Coverage for Finland, all navigable and named roads in Finland have been verified and up to 204 NAVTEQ attributes have been applied to those roads where applicable. Attributes enable and enhance navigation by avoiding legal and physical restrictions and providing important driver information such as number of lanes in each direction of travel, speed limits and special speed situations.
Also included are over 40 categories of Points of Interest (POIs) that assist users in selecting their destination and routing to the businesses like restaurants, stores and gas stations they are looking for. POI attributes include identifying that the name is different in another language from its natural language, a common situation in the bilingual areas of the country where both Finnish and Swedish are spoken and written.
“Complete Detailed Coverage allows NAVTEQ customers to develop turn-by-turn navigation applications for over five million Finns from urban areas such as Helsinki to the remote tundra in Lapland,” stated George Filley, Vice President of Product Management for NAVTEQ, “We’re one step closer to meeting our goal to provide our highest level of road network attribution to all Western Europeans by the end of the year.”
With the commencement of the EU Presidency in Finland in July, NAVTEQ’s over 600,000 km of roads and approximately 12,000 POIs will benefit the participants to the approximately 130 meetings scattered around over 20 locations in the country that are expected to take place in Finland.
Read More in: GPS News