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Navteq's recent announcement of its Map and Positioning Engine strategy may turn out to be one of the most important announcements by a map maker during 2008. It conceals a whole new use for maps and positioning technology, and a level of importance that it is almost impossible to overstate. If Navteq gets its way, one day you may trust your life to its data every time you get into a car.

The strategy is part of Navteq's move to Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. ADAS is a host of technologies that involve the use of information systems to aid drivers. Naturally enough, a lot of them involve the position of the car relative to the road.

However, all these systems depend on the database in the navigation device in the car. Typically, this will be purchased with the device, and get progressively more out of date as time passes.

Speaking at the Sydney Motor Show on 9 October, Navteq's Kirk Mitchell said that Navteq and other map makers have made it possible to download updates online. But there is no doubt this is a clumsy way to interact with users. Mitchell says Navteq, along with all the other suppliers, is looking at automatic interaction between the device in the car and roadside servers, using the Radio Data Service that is now available on most FM radio stations. The specific carriage of traffic information is called the Traffic Management Channel. Such channels are now being implemented in many centres.

However, standards and agreements are necessary to make such systems operate so that any data service can talk to any device in any car. This problem is compounded by the fact that both map and auto makers operate globally, so international standards are required.

There is still room for cultural expression however. Mitchell noted that in India and other Asian cultures, people express directions in terms of landmarks. In the West, they tend to use street names.

The trend in all this technology is towards alerting the driver of difficult or dangerous conditions. At some stage, the systems will become so comprehensive they may replace the driver completely.

The last DARPA Grand Challenge, run by the US military, demonstrated the ability of driverless vehicles to navigate urban streets, avoiding each other, pedestrians, dogs and other random obstacles. Allied with the kind of advanced navigation now on display, drivers may well be a threatened species.

ASM Newsletter is distributed by e-mail every two weeks. It reports on events in the spatial industry in Asia and events outside the region which will impact on Asia.