Making Maps Navigable - Programming GPS and OpenStreetMap Applications with Java - page 121

files to be loaded in different systems, which have an internal DB engine in
the target system.
The Dream of the Incremental Compiler
It is apparent that every new map delivery has to go through a full com-
pilation to reveal data changes and problems. This is not very satisfactory
when you know that digital map releases only deviate by a maximum of
10% per quarter. This raises the idea of an incremental map compiler,
which can identify the changes in a map and patch them into the previous
map product. Besides saving compilation time to reduce the time to mar-
ket, an incremental map update on the target opens a wide range of new
business models for dynamic map updates.
Nevertheless, a map compilation is a dedicated process with a tool chain
of different manipulation programs. Also, a map vendor can not guarantee
identical ID spaces for links and other map features and this makes it very
hard to identify map changes.
For your own projects, you might consider extracting a stable network
from the map and run a delta process on the latest map release. The net-
work can be optimized to the target application, enriched with navigation
hints, etc.