A dedicated team of people travel through every road and street in Malaysia and painstakingly record every detail, point by point, to create a comprehensive, dependable digital map for navigation systems. Here is how they do it.

Layouts waiting to be verified by surveyors. Rapid urbanisation and growth keeps surveyors endlessly busy.

Navigation systems were probably unheard of in Malaysia until very recently. The sudden explosion of navigation systems in Malaysia, evident in the large numbers that are showing up in malls dedicated to computer and electronic gadgets such as Low Yat Plaza in downtown Kuala Lumpur and Digital Mall in the heart of Petaling Jaya proves that Malaysian consumers are riding the crest of gadgetry and would love to get their hands on the latest electronic toy in the market.

The integration of navigation capabilities in mobile phones creates even bigger awareness on navigation technology. Phone manufacturers look for ways to add value to their product in a crowded marketplace, and having navigation capabilities built into phones seemed like a natural progression from photo and video capturing. These navigation features make their way to the latest product line-up and are made known to the public in massively-budgeted advertisements campaigns and marketing programmes.

Sensing a trend, car manufacturers have recently included navigation systems as an option for cars sold in Malaysia. Although commonplace in cars sold in the Japanese, European and American markets, Malaysian motorists are only beginning to open into this technology as they evaluate the usefulness of such system against other ways of finding directions such as phoning a friend or stopping for directions. However, as new townships and urban centres spring up in previously unheard-of places, navigation systems will take centrestage in ensuring that we find the way to our destination.

A Navi & Map survey team ready to hit the road.

A navigation system is a device that has the capability of knowing your current position, and allows you to determine your destination. Once you have informed the navigation system of where you want to go, it figures out how to get there and gives you directions to it. To be truly useful, a navigation system would need a map to refer to. This map contains information such as the location of buildings, roads and the various traffic regulations that needs to be adhered to. A good navigation system is only as good as the map that it uses.

The need for detailed and accurate maps for navigation purposes in Malaysia is being addressed by various mapping companies. Creating maps for navigation systems requires intimate knowledge of Malaysia’s road network and a fierce devotion to the job, as the country continuously expands its towns and cities on a daily basis. Such dedication can be found in the surveyors and cartographers of Navi & Map Sdn. Bhd., whom for the last 2 years have been collecting and digitizing every detail on every road and street in Malaysia.

A map layout with the surveyor’s notes and corrections, which include new buildings and changes in traffic flow.

"There’s always something new being built somewhere", says Nik Rahim, who supervises the surveyors in Navi & Map. "Our job is to find out where it is". As evident in their morning briefings, it is no easy task. Every morning, Nik and his surveyors identify new areas that needs to be surveyed and places that needs to be updated. Each survey team leaves the morning briefing with a layout of the area that needs to be surveyed. These layouts will be filled with notes and annotations when the surveyors return in the evening.

A survey team consists of three surveyors, each with a specific task. Saiful does GPS collection in one of the survey teams. “We use a GPS pathfinder that accurately records our movement into a laptop or PDA. The result on the screen is a continuous line that shows our path of travel, which will later be translated into a street, road or highway”.

To effectively record a street or road into the laptop, surveyors travel both ways, along the entire length of the road. “Sometimes the pathfinder cannot get a clear GPS signal, and that results in a broken path being recorded. We have strict rules against broken paths so when this happens, we have to traverse the entire length all over again”.

Surveyors at work.

Farhan, a youthful 24-year old teams up with Saiful and is tasked with data collection. Farhan dutifully collects information such as road classification (whether the road that is being captured by the pathfinder is a highway, road or street), traffic flow and restrictions, road signposts, as well as points of interests (POIs) which include places like restaurants, parking facilities, hotels, petrol stations, and more. For every point of interest, Farhan needs to note its exact location, along with information such as its name, phone number, entrance and pictures of the place.

Another surveyor, Anuar, does video collection. Anuar records the traffic flow and signages, especially at junctions and elevated roads. His video recordings will be used as reference to write complex rules and algorithms that tells the navigation system how a junction should be approached, and whether a turn is possible. His video will also be used to create 3D renderings of highway entrances and exits, an impressive feature in the car navigation system that is currently being marketed by Navi & Map.

GPS pathfinder recordings.

The recorded GPS paths are converted to roads and streets, and Points of Interests are inserted.

A finished map.

As the survey teams spill out from the office with their equipment, the map processing teams begin their day by reviewing the surveyors’ previous day’s work. Quality Control teams go through pages of data from the GPS pathfinders, as well as information and video collected by the surveyors. These bits and pieces of information are assembled together and handed over to digitisers to be transformed into a map.

It is at the dexterous hands of these digitisers that maps begin to take its initial form. GPS pathfinder recordings transform to street, roads and highways, scribbles on a surveyor’s layout become police stations, shopping malls and hotels, complete with address, phone numbers and other necessary information. A small team of graphic designers convert photographs and video into 3D graphic renderings.

Although the end result looks like a map, it cannot be used for navigation purposes yet. Altogether, it takes seven different teams to work on every map before the map can be installed in a car navigation system. Traffic rules and regulations must be included, the entrance and exit points for buildings, roads and highways must be clearly defined, and the location of every road divider and signage must be precisely marked. Such obsession to detail is obvious. The map would be feeding information for the car navigation system to correctly calculate and recommend the best route to any selected destination. Providing the wrong information would result in the navigation system directing the driver to make an illegal turn, drive against the traffic flow, or worse still, drive off-course.

The finished maps that are installed in the carnavi® are so detailed, it enables the system to provide door-to-door navigation capabilities. The system has the ability to recognize complete house addresses and even phone numbers, and match these inputs to a location you can drive to. Highway entrances and exits appear in 3D as you approach them, and turn-by-turn directions are given either in English, Bahasa Malaysia or Mandarin. The amount of information contained within these maps is so immense that carnavi® comes with a hard disk to store and process all these data.

The surveyors return later in the evening, their laptops and PDAs packed with pathfinder recordings, their clipboards brimming with notes and corrections to existing maps. A day’s worth of work and data is dutifully uploaded into one of the many servers for the map processing team to work on tomorrow, and the surveyors call it a day. There are still plenty of places to cover and maps to existing places that needs to be updated. Judging by the unrelenting pace of our nation’s progress, the surveyors and cartographers at Navi & Map will have many busy days ahead.