The smart city track is really getting really crowded. 

Whether  the various brain platforms or operating systems, people are confused at massive concepts. However, a city is not a static physical body, but an ever-changing project with dynamic adjustment. At every moment, the space-time information is changing.  Undoubtedly, the digital map provider has the most powerful means to monitor the location of every vehicle, every pedestrian and every building. 

Baidu Map, AMAP, Tencent Map and Qianxun SI all engage in this business, and even Huawei and meituan.com want to take a bite at this big cake. As digital map provider founded 17 years ago, NavInfo has become the world’s fourth largest digital map provider with strong strength in big data of location. 

The most important two parts in smart city is traffic police and transport informatization. NavInfo has seized both of them, and neither can be separated from the demand for location data. It can be seen that once “location data”, the “variable” in city operation is grasped, the key to a smart city will be found. 

Taking the opportunity of the release of the MineData Location Big Data Platform 3.0 by NavInfo and its subsidiary Cennavi, Leiphone had an in-depth dialogue with Liang Yongjie, SVP of NavInfo and General Manager of Cennavi, etc. to analyze the current urban ambition of NavInfo in the current context. 

Clear line, value differentiation of 3 generations of products 

As a professional big data company of NavInfo, Cennavi is an important layout of NavInfo in smart city. 

Cennavi is responsible for operating MineData Location Big Data Platform incubated in NavInfo in 2017. The platform mainly provides the multi-dimensional location big data for business support, and works with professional algorithms and visualization effects to customize exclusive location big data solutions. 

According to Liang Yongjie, as early as in 2017, they found that 70% of all the data available to people contained location information. That is to say, location big data can be applied very extensively. For example, traffic police may use location big data for congestion analysis, command and dispatch; Insurance companies can predict accident-prone roads, and process complex insurance policies. In the future, in addition to be charged by time, the premium can also be charged based on the changes in the vehicle location. 

 “As big data, 5G, AI and cloud computing have become the core technologies in the new era, the boundary between different industries are becoming increasingly more blurred, so there will be much cross-border cooperation. We find that location big data will be a treasure filled with infinite value.” 

Therefore, after years of operation of location information, MineData 1.0 came out in 2017. NavInfo “reshaped itself” by pulling together location data in the past 15 years . 

In 2018, an important change was made to MineData 2.0: Openness. 

In this version, the location big data capability has been integrated with industry partner data and business. At the same time, smarter and convenient intelligent management has been used for the online algorithm platform, showing awesome effects in visualization. 

In the summer of 2019, MineData was upgraded again, the 3.0 version was launched. After a series of processing, every data has become a new data through correlation. This year, NavInfo also released 5 new products, including traffic prediction, vehicle information, road condition voice and road weather services as well as road reference based on NDS (global map data standard for the car ecosystem). 

Leiphone noticed that many new functions have been added to the 3.0 version. For example, map engine leaped from a 2D plane to a 3D sphere, which was awesome and practical; The new road condition processing platform based on machine learning has been adopted, so that the accuracy of road conditions has been greatly improved. In terms of road condition coverage, it takes the lead in supporting the road condition in Taiwan, so it has become the first traffic information service provider to really cover the entire territory of China; As for autonomous driving, it also prompts road danger information based on the vehicle sensor data. According to insiders, NavInfo planned to release the road condition information service based on daily updated maps in the second half of the year. 

In the past 10 years, NavInfo has built the most complete and largest vehicle trajectory big data database in China. At present, more than 30 million vehicles have been active every day, and these vehicles travel more than 1.2 billion kilometers per day. Based on these tracks, more than 5.7 million owners provide services. 

 “Building global location-based service ecology and location interconnection will be the new coordinates of Cennavi (NavInfo).”
Have boundary consciousness and work with B-end giant 

Liang Yongjie was aware that different from Baidu Map, AMAP and other companies, NavInfo had more B-end genes and paid more attention to the complex and diverse needs of customers, while other map products provided more universal services and could not make adjustments for personal users. 

 “Truly observe customers, and experience what they really need and what system can help them improve efficiency rather than imagine a scenario at home. Doing the industry business in a transparent and solid way is the gene of NavInfo.” 

Liang Yongjie has always believed that never do everything in the B-end business but do what you are good at; If you do everything, you will hit a dead end. 

This logic can be found in NavInfo. NavInfo integrates public security, traffic police and other business data at the location level,  and leaves strongly related insurance, video and other services to its partners. 

This is a strong sense of boundary. 

As for the cooperation with Hikvision, NavInfo is satisfied with the massive static video data of Hikvision. If the dynamic location data of NavInfo are added, urban security, population tracking and even autonomous driving will have unlimited possibilities; As for the cooperation with Smart City of Ping’an, NavInfo is aimed at building a bridge between the two sides for financial insurance demands. 

SGITG, a company of State Grid specialized in map data, has independently developed the geographic information platform of State Grid and managed 1.8 billion device coordinates and topology information of the state power system. Massive space and business data accumulated are very large. NavInfo also chose cooperation. In the future, both sides may have important moves at the data level or the GIS level of power equipment. 

Seek new USP and provide “abstruse” urban services 

Since we choose to open up rather than close our door, NavInfo must stick to its core value. 

Xu Jinhui, chief engineer of Cennavi, told Leiphone that many manufacturers built urban brains to sell servers and cloud services, while what NavInfo did was to provide location big data services for more industries. This may be the difference. 

In early years, the public security system has been developing the police geographic information system (PGIS). Public security is information first and putting safety on priority. Whoever masters all kinds of numbers and information first will get the initiative in work. However, since there has been no unified standard for address information collection, and the existing data are often distributed in different business system, which are diverse in format and not connected or shared with each other, it has caused scattered data and cumbersome statistics. 

Now, the public security system is rebuilding a new generation of location information, because the capacity of space has provided particularly strong support for police affairs in various places. NavInfo also launched a new generation of police geographic information, which has been deeply integrated with police business from the updating of data and application of new technologies. 

Xu Jinhui mentioned that 70% of the products provided by Cennavi were standardized. The data of every industry are also required to customize the remaining 30%, otherwise “nothing will be made”. 

In terms of urban planning, there have been three embarrassing situations: 

1) Data silo. Data are required to make decisions for urban planning. However, data must be provided by the outside world rather than owned. 
2) The front-end perception of big data analysis is still not deep or thorough enough. 
3) The planning of urban roads lacks scientific decision-making, that is, the professional level needs to be improved. 
Under such circumstances, NavInfo worked with China Academy of Urban Planning & Design and developed CAUPD Intelligent Drawing, an Urban Traffic Planning Big Data Platform, which provides three major analysis systems: road operation, public transportation and individual travel. The cloud computing traffic model was also developed innovatively. Cennavi is responsible for the specific R & D and implementation of the platform, and works with CAUPD to carry out product planning, big data algorithm model analysis, etc. 
All the signs indicate that NavInfo is becoming clear in thought and ambitious from location interconnection to smart city.