A variety of solutions exists today for finding routing or navigation information for traveling from one place to another. Some of these solutions use native mapping applications and map databases that are locally resident on a user's computer or device and can operate without access to a data network. Other routing solutions use mapping applications that communicate with a server over a data network to obtain the routing information.
Regardless of the type of routing solution, a presently available routing solution is capable of providing one or more route choices or routing options, given an origin and destination information. Many routing solutions compute the routes based on user's preferences such as the types of roads used in the route, toll usage, shortest time or distance preference, or routes formed by omitting prohibited areas. These map-specific preferences used in the prior art are hereinafter referred to as cartographic preferences.
Often, a presently available routing solution does not give the user routing choices, but chooses one or many possible routes based on the above-described cartographic preferences. Even if a routing solution were to present multiple routing choices to the user, the choices would only be selectable based on one or more of the above-described cartographic preferences.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds