Mapping and location technology company TomTom is collecting a lot of data; 21 billion data points are added daily, drawn from devices, apps and in-dash systems. TomTom calls this crowdsourcing of information ‘community input’.
Despite, or perhaps owing to, this vast quantity, according to Heiko Schilling, head of TomTom navigation, the data collected is actually quite simple. It is GPS trace data, which is a latitude-longitude co-ordinate with a time stamp, collected every second. The number of subjects generating that data is also vast; 800 million automotive, enterprise and telematics customers.
With that data TomTom can create a map of road networks and crossings. “That is 65 million kilometres of road network and we can rebuild that on an hourly basis globally,” he said. He added that in urban areas where road data is constantly flowing in, TomTom can rebuild the maps in 20 minutes.
As TomTom has been storing this information in a historic database of speed values since 2006, Schilling and his team are able to deduce how fast people are driving at a given points in time. He is interested in the other information about the road network that can be gleaned from driving speeds.
“Take traffic lights, for instance,” he said. “From the data patterns you can derive whether a certain crossing has a traffic light and the traffic light pattern. You can see if it is not in synch and how this can cause a jam situation at certain hours of the day.” This information can then be relayed to councils and local authorities, which is helpful because Schilling said that some councils do not know where all their traffic lights are, or whether they are in working order.
TomTom Navigation is also able to deduce information about parking. “Every time a journey starts, a parking slot becomes available. Every time a journey ends, you can assume parking availability is there. If you do that at scale, suddenly you can very accurately tell when you can find parking slots in the city and when you cannot.”
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