Using Segment Fraction for Road-Network Locations

When dealing with locations on the road network, geographic coordinates, com­ monly represented in the form of (latitude, longitude), can often be difficult to use and are hard to interpret. Not only do these coordinates omit any explicit road network information, such as what road segment the location belongs to, but even simple operations such as speed computation cannot be performed with­ out summing road distance over the segment geometry. In certain applications, map projection [Yang et al. 1999] and linear referencing [Scarponcini 2002] have been utilized to make locations easier to analyze or to associate certain attributes without compromising precision. We propose extending the concept of linear ref­ erencing to the entirety of road-based locations and show that we can perform local searches, speed computation, location prediction, and interpolation with simple, linear formulas. Using Segment Fraction for Road-Network Locations