The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is offering a solution to improve compatibility of car navigation systems with the databases they access.
The ISO, last Wednesday, introduced a new international standard for the Application Programming Interface (API) used to build navigation system software.
Navigation systems are increasingly being built into new cars as an option in order to give drivers directions, pinpoint their location using GPS, help them find restaurants, gas stations or hotels and even reroute them around traffic congestion. After market navigation systems are sold separately to be installed in older vehicles.
“As the car navigation industry has grown so has incompatibility between navigation systems and the databases that store important location information,” the ISO stated in a news release.
The standard, ISO 17267:2009, is intended to improve the interoperability between navigation systems and map databases. The new standard describes what data may be retrieved from a database, defines the interface for access and specifies a set of navigation function calls.
