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Does anyone have a contact at Tom Tom. Maybe Dave the owner of the site.
It would be good if this site could get someone from TomTom to do an interview or something. To see what are the plans there are to fix these errors. Are all these errors passed on to TomTom ?
Joined: Nov 14, 2003 Posts: 2143 Location: Surrounded by A1, M1 & M25
Posted: Sat Nov 15, 2003 12:12 am Post subject: Confused Routes
The Navigator can plan access between the M11 and Charlie Browns roundabout. Unfortunately this involves a 100ft drop!
It also throws wobblies Northbound between J7 (Harlow) & J8 (Stansted) on the M11. It sees imaginary changes in the road with commands like "100 yards ahead keep right" when you are miles from a junction. Try and plan a route from J7 to J8 and you will see what I mean.
Palmers Green (London N13) is missing and various maps think that Southgate in London N14 is in Kings Lynn & Norfolk or Swansea.
It also misses about 10 miles of the A11 Dual Carriageway near Attleborough in Norfolk imagining it to be single carriageway. I suppose this is down to out of date information.
Posted: Sat Nov 22, 2003 2:31 am Post subject: Re: Navigator 2 Places not in database
NigelJ wrote:
Most of the houses in many of the villages in Wales have a name but have never had a number and in a lot of cases these names have been there for a hunred years or more. I find it inexcusable that the software does not include house names. One of my houses is called 'Clydfan' and has been for at least the last 200 years yet ( its been in my family for at least 250 years) it still cannot be found as it is in the counry side on a road which according to TTN2 is unnamed with no house numbers. I can only assume the maps are not four months out of date ie December 2002 but perhaps December 1802. the postman has no difficulty finding it when he wants to deliver a bill!!!
I agree. As a delivery driver and recent new user of TomTom2, I've noticed that there seems to be a fundamental weakness in TTN2 in that it cannot cope with an address unless it has a strict street numbering scheme and the number is unique in the street. It simply has no concept of house names. The street I live on (a busy main road in South Wales) has lots of clusters of cottages and terraces, each having its own name. To take some local examples where I live on Llantrisant Road, there is a 4 Llest Terrace, 4 Bryn Villas, 4 Brynllefrith Cottages, 4 Station Cottages, all within a few hundred yards. TTN2 can only cope with '4 Llantrisant Road'. This situation will be replicated throughout the UK, especially in rural areas. The TTN2 software developers need to address this important weakness in their addressing logic. It is not just that the data is missing from the database, but also that there would be no way to express or search for this type of address in the software.
Having said all that, I would like to finish on a positive note by saying that TTN2 has far surpassed and other mapping software I;ve used in the past (though, that isn't saying all that much really). Still, it is an impressive tool and fun to use.
Wolverton Milton Keynes comes up as Wolverton Startford-on-Avon.
Would be nice to be able to enter addresses by postcode and house number, and also to have 'go via' as well so that you can force the route to certain roads :P
Joined: 17/05/2003 02:26:21 Posts: 3747 Location: Bedfordshire, UK
Posted: Fri Dec 26, 2003 6:47 pm Post subject:
Replying to Tim's comments further up the page.
The street numbering isn't perfect. In part, this is to do with the trade off between file size and usability. If the files contained more data, they'd become larger (which would mean people needing larger, more expensive storage cards), also searching could become even slower than it already is (the search speed is fine on my hardware, but for some people it's very slow).
256MB SD cards are affordable - but there's been little movement on the price of 512MB SD cards, which still cost in excess of 150 pounds unless you track down a particularly good offer. I am not aware of commercial availability of anything larger - I know someone that was lent a sample 1GB SD card to experiment with, and he found it simply didn't work in his Pocket PC.
So far as I can make out, TomTom Navigator 2 has a certain number of house number locations stored accurately, then it interpolates for the rest. For example, on the cul-de-sac where I live, there's six house. Navigator correctly knows that numbers 3 and 4 are at the end of the street. It also knows which way the numbering works - the numbers run round the cul-de-sac from 1 to 6.
However, it has numbers 1 and 6 right at the junction, and 2 and 5 shown half way along. This doesn't reflect reality - if you want to talk about front doors, numbers 1 and 6 are approximately half way along (the end of the cul-de-sac near the junction are the side walls of gardens), and numbers 2 and 4 are virtually in the corners, with 3 at the end of the road. However, it still gives a good idea of what is where. The road is only around 200m long in any case!
The use of partial data and interpolation means that if there's gaps or discontinuities in numbering, such as a street in Ely where a friend lives where there's a gap in the houses on one side of the street, Navigator can get the location rather wrong. Most of the time, it's nearly right, though.
You have to remember GPS isn't metre perfect; whilst it usually performs rather better than Standard Positioning System specification since the ending of Selective Availability, the position fix can be 100m or more out, particularly in poor satellite reception conditions. SBAS (in Europe, EGNOS) can help, but SBAS isn't ideally suited to in-car use, because of its reliance on geostationary satellites that are relatively low to the horizon.
House names - this is arguably a more extreme cases of postcodes. In any case, so far as I can tell from using royalmail.com, the Royal Mail postcode database doesn't have information on quite a lot of house names. I don't think there's geodata available from any supplier that gives accurate locations for houses by name and street.
There is data available that gives the location of each house number / postcode combination. However, this data is not freely accessible now (multimap.com and the like now charge you if you want to access it, because they're charged by the suppliers). Even if you want postcode location, without the number refinement, so you just have the location of the centre of each postcode, that is still a significant amount of data that has a licence cost attached.
The postcode POIs on this site have been extracted from a desktop Windows product that has this data built in (MS MapPoint, I think). They illustrate how big the data is - it's well in excess of 100MB for the entire country, although .ov2 is not the most compact format for storing this type of data, nor is it the most optimised for searching.
I'm glad for the data there is in Navigator 2 UK - the house number is useful without making the map files excessively large. If you need better locations than the data in the maps can manage, it's best to find those on your PC and get them into Navigator via POI files. Richard (Oldie) has written several tools that help with this.
Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2004 8:34 pm Post subject: Lymington, Hampshire
The above town is missing, as are roads within it (Queen Elizabeth Avenue). Very annoying that there are these sorts of omissions on an allegedly complete UK map... _________________ frmarcus
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