Improving Navigation: Automated Name Extraction for Separately Mapped Pedestrian and Cycle Links

Abstract

In digital street graphs it is common that street names for separately mapped pedestrian and cycle links are missing. Often, these unnamed links run parallel to a named road, and it would be beneficial to use this information to generate instructions similar to “follow the sidewalk along Street A”, whereby “Street A” has to be determined by an algorithm. This paper introduces the Unnamed Link Naming Problem (ULNP) and presents a new approach to automatically extract suitable names to describe separately mapped pedestrian and cycle links. Using OSM data for Vienna results show that our best method achieves 90.7% correct matches in this challenging setting.