Apple Inc.

David B Luper

Christine B McGavran

Francois M Jouaux

Rama Krishna Chitta

François M Jouaux

Christophe Hivert

Some embodiments provide a method for defining travel paths in a map region. The method identifies location data collected over a period of time from multiple mobile devices. The method aggregates the location data for each of multiple map areas. The aggregated data for each map area identifies an amount of mobile device traffic passing through the map area over the period of time. The method normalizes the aggregated data for a subset of the multiple map areas based on analysis of the relative amounts of mobile device traffic. The method uses the normalized data to identify paths in the map.

Normalization of device probe data for path identification

Georeferenced transaction data is harvested ('crowd-sourced') from client devices and sent to a network-based map service. The map service performs cluster analysis on location data points in the harvested data, resulting in one or more clusters representing local densities of transaction occurrences. Data vectors including supplemental data are obtained from one or more vendors. Location data points included in the data vectors are compared to center coordinates of the one or more clusters and the closest matching cluster/vector pair provides a mapping to POI data in a POI database. The mapped POI data is updated with the supplemental data. In some implementations, transaction timestamps in the harvested data are used to estimate the business hours of a business POI.

Growing community of inventors

Cupertino, CA, United States of America

David B Luper