Towards a Landmark-Based Pedestrian Navigation Service Using OSM Data

With the advent of location-aware smartphones, the desire for pedestrian-based navigation services has increased. Unlike car-based services where instructions generally are comprised of distance and road names, pedestrian instructions should instead focus on the delivery of landmarks to aid in navigation. OpenStreetMap (OSM) contains a vast amount of geospatial information that can be tapped into for identifying these landmark features. This paper presents a prototype navigation service that extracts landmarks suitable for navigation instructions from the OSM dataset based on several metrics. This is coupled with a short comparison of landmark availability within OSM, differences in routes between locations with different levels of OSM completeness and a short evaluation of the suitability of the landmarks provided by the prototype. Landmark extraction is performed on a server-side service, with the instructions being delivered to a pedestrian navigation application running on an Android mobile device.