III: Small: Towards Highly Accurate Map Services

地图服务，包括查找到某个目的地的路线或搜索附近的设施，已经授权了各种无处不在的服务和应用，包括交通、基于位置的服务、乘车共享和更广泛的交付行业。所有这些服务的一个主要假设是底层地图是准确的，但这并不总是正确的。地图受到各种不准确性的影响，这些不准确性影响了地图服务的最优性。虽然这对于不准确可能仅意味着几分钟延迟的因果用户来说是可以接受的，但对于支持大量用户的地图服务的应用程序来说，情况并非如此。最近的报告显示，美国地图不准确每年仅快递公司就损失数十亿美元。随着在线购物者和骑手的增加，这一趋势将进一步增长，这将流量从休闲用户转移到交付公司和乘车共享服务。该项目旨在通过研究、开发必要的知识和构建软件基础设施来显著提高基础地图的准确性，这将直接影响地图服务的效率。该项目旨在通过利用两个正交方向来实现其目标。首先，构建全球范围内最全面、最准确的地图，对地图的广泛定义超越了传统的地图拓扑结构，成为包括交通相关元数据在内的更丰富的定义，如果没有这些元数据，大多数地图服务的准确性将很低。这是通过利用轨迹数据和开源地图来识别和推断缺失的信息来实现的。第二，开发新技术，在精确构建的地图上提高查询处理器的准确性。这是通过理解查询处理器的错误模式并使用它来校准查询结果来实现的，同时利用准确构建的地图及其元数据。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估而被认为值得支持。

Map services, including finding the route to a certain destination or searching for nearby facilities, have empowered a variety of ubiquitous services and applications, including transportation, location-based services, ride-sharing, and a broader delivery industry. A major assumption for all such services is that the underlying map is accurate, which is not always true. Maps suffer from all sorts of inaccuracies that impact the optimality of map services. While this may be acceptable for causal users where inaccuracy may only mean few minutes of delay, it is not the case for applications that support map services for large numbers of users. Recent reports show that map inaccuracy in the USA costs delivery companies alone billions of dollars annually. This trend is just going to increase with the increase of online shoppers and riders, which shifts traffic from casual users to delivery companies and ride sharing services. This project aims to conduct research, develop requisite knowledge, and build software infrastructure that will significantly boost the accuracy of the underlying map, which will have a direct impact on map services efficiency.The project aims to achieve its goals through exploiting two orthogonal directions. First, building the most comprehensive and accurate maps worldwide, with a broad definition of a map that goes beyond the traditional map topology to a richer definition that includes traffic-related metadata, without which, most of map services will have low accuracy. This is achieved through harnessing trajectory data and open-source maps to identify and infer missing information. Second, developing new techniques that would increase the accuracy of query processors over the accurately built maps. This is achieved through understanding the error patterns of query processors and using it to calibrate the query results, while taking advantage of the accurately built maps and their metadata.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.