April/May 2007

A new range of digital map data for navigation and location-based services has been launched by Tele Atlas, one of the leaders in this market, and is said to offer faster loading and better performance than previous versions.

StreetMap Premium Europe is more compact than past versions, and the company says this means that users can load the map database as a convenient, single data source without going through a series of preparatory steps such as decompression, extraction and merging of layers.

At its heart, the new product is a database containing compressed digital map data of more than 20 European countries, built to ESRI's Smart Data Compression (SDC) specifications. Tele Atlas says the SDC specification ensures its compatibility with the latest versions of ERSI's ArcGIS, Network Analyst and ArcMIS Route Server products.

It contains 7.5 million kilometres of roads, house numbers for 350 million inhabitants, and nearly two million points of interest covering a wide range of European countries including the UK.