1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to the use of navigation systems. In particular, the present invention enables better timing and routing information to be provided related to points of interest along a route.
2. Description of the Related Art
Navigation systems are popularly used to guide travelers to destinations. Such systems are available built into vehicles or free-standing, to be moved from vehicle to vehicle; for use by drivers and/or pedestrians; as purpose-built devices or as applications on general-purpose devices such as personal digital assistants or mobile telephones; and as systems that are entirely self-contained or as systems that utilize a remote server to perform some or all of their calculations. We refer generally to these systems as “navigation systems.”
Since a common use of navigation systems is to guide the traveler to a desired destination, an important function of such systems is the selection of the destination. In some cases, the driver selects the destination by entering the address. In others, the driver selects the destination from a personal list of stored destinations, typically including home and work. In addition, the driver often wants to select a destination from a directory of “points of interest”.
Points of interest (“POIs”) include many kinds of destinations that drivers may want to find, either when running errands near home or when traveling away from home, such as hotels, restaurants, gas stations, stores of various kinds, roadside rest areas, and emergency services such as hospitals or police stations. The driver may want to search for any POI in a given category (e.g., any restaurant), or for a POI with a given name in a given category (e.g., a restaurant whose name contains “Taqueria”), or for a POI with a given name in any category (e.g., a POI whose name contains “Taqueria”, without knowing whether the category should be “restaurant” or “fast food”). The driver may want to search for POIs radially around the current location, without regard to any previous or current destination. Alternatively, the driver may want to search for POIs near an already-computed route, for example, finding a gas station near the currently planned route to a destination. All of these kinds of search are commonly supported in modern navigation systems.