Point of Interest

Point Of Interest (POI ) ( " interesting place ", or " place of interest" (POI) ) is a term related to navigation systems and route planners.

POIs are places that might have implications for the users of a map or a navigation system. These can be used to satisfy the daily needs or specific travel needs, such as restaurants, lodging, gas stations, ATMs or parking garages. You can contact points represent, in urgent situations, such as garages, pharmacies or hospitals, or they point to tourist attractions and leisure facilities, including cinemas, sports stadiums, museums and other attractions.

They can be represented on the map as little icons. Depending on the equipment navigation systems offer additional options, visually or audibly to refer to such places when you approach them. In addition, can be stored for POIs additional information, such as descriptions, opening times, postal address and telephone number.

Particularly striking points are referred to as landmarks for guidance only.

File formats

There are many different data formats to store POI data, even when the same underlying coordinate system ( WGS-84) is used. Some of the reasons why so many variations exist to store the same data, are:

  • A lack of standards in this area ( GPX is a noteworthy attempt to create such a standard )
  • The attempt by some software vendors to disguise their data by
  • Licensing issues that prevent the file specifications can be used by competitors,
  • Memory problems, for example by converting floating-point coordinates ( Latitude and Longitude) into smaller integer values ​​,
  • Speed ​​and battery life ( representation of the longitude and latitude as an integer is less CPU - intensive than a floating-point number ),
  • The requirement for the data to append own attribute fields.

File formats that are used for the exchange of POI data:

  • ASCII text (. Asc. Txt. Csv)
  • Topografix GPX (. Gpx)
  • Garmin Mapsource (. Gdb)
  • Google Earth Keyhole Markup Language (. Kml kmz. )
  • Pocket Street Pushpins (. Psp)
  • Maptech Marks (. Msf )
  • Maptech Waypoint (. Mxf )
  • Microsoft MapPoint Pushpin (. Csv)
  • ( Wpt ). OziExplorer
  • TomTom overlay (. Ov2 ) and (. Tlv )

Other vendors provide converter available to convert the file formats of the POI into each other (eg GPSBabel ).

Computer icon GPS Exchange Format
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