The effort improves street data for many urbanized areas and more.

Tele Atlas North America, a unit of Tele Atlas NV, announced that it has completed the repositioning of its street map data in 93 of the top 100 U.S. Census urbanized areas. The repositioning effort improves street data for 92 percent of the population living in these areas. Respondents to independent surveys of more 200 companies chose positional accuracy as the most important data feature. The repositioning effort involved tasks such as moving road geometry to match the shape and position of roads as represented in source material including ortho-rectified imagery and field-collected data, adding any new geometry, removing spurious geometry in the Census TIGER data, and enhancing dual carriageways that were represented in TIGER as single digitized lines. Through an independent research company, Tele Atlas North America completed market studies of more than 200 companies in the fields of business support systems, telecommunications, utilities, risk management, fleet management, public safety and location based services to ascertain their critical factors in choosing a digital map provider. The survey asked customers to rate the importance of data features on a scale of one through five (five being the most important). Customers found Positional Accuracy the most important factor in selecting a provider of digital map databases.