What is the NDS Association?

NDS is a registered association with the vision of providing a leading world-wide map standard for automotive grade use. The NDS Association consists of car manufacturers, application/compiler developers, map and service providers.

What is the situation?

• Worldwide success of navigation, but high effort maintaining proprietary formats
• Cost is the challenge in a competitive market

The mission of the NDS Association

The NDS association innovates automotive grade map technology by defining the NDS standard with the following objectives:

• Technical furtherance of the development of a standard for data used for navigation and map-based driver assistance as well as selected interfaces.
• Standardized methods and solutions for the effective use and update of navigation data.
• Furtherance of the dissemination of the standard for navigation data.
• Licensing of the standard for navigation data.
• Certification of the conformity of navigation data with the standard and certification of the conformity of systems with the standard, which support interfaces of the navigation data.

In order to fulfil this mission, the NDS Association supports NDS projects, evolves the standard and grows the association.

Open Auto Drive Forum

The Open Auto Drive Forum (OADF) is a platform for all stakeholders in the area of digital maps and autonomous driving.

On July 12, 2018 the 10th OADF meeting took place in Wuhan, China. The meeting was co-sponsored by SAIC KBD (show summary).

News

• NDS released the NDS Open Lane Model (download); Press Release available in English, French, German and Japanese.
• 2017: NDS welcomes its new members EnGIS, Pioneer and Renault!
• May 2017: Dr. Sasse (NavInfo) and J. Angenvoort (Garmin) were re-elected as SC Chairman/Vice Chairman.
• 2018: By end of 2017, the NDS membes have certified the impressive number of 553 NDS products.
• 2018: NDS welcomes its new members Bertrandt, Kuandeng and SK Telecom!

more news

NDS at the ITS World Congress in Copenhagen!

NDS will be represented at the ITS World Congress in Copenhagen on September 17-21.

• 20.09.2018 at 11:00: Join the panel discussion we have organized with the other Open Auto Dive Forum members: 'SIS66: Open Auto Drive Forum: A New Cooperation Approach for an Automated Driving Ecosystem'. If you are working with digital maps, ADAS systems, traffic information, sharing of sensor data in the cloud or automated driving this is the place to be.
• 17-21.09.2018: Visit us at the NDS booth for learning about NDS (C1-120)!

Releases of NDS

• 01.02.2018: Release of NDS version 2.4.5
• 13.03.2018: Release of NDS version 2.5.3
• 11.06.2018: Release of NDS version 2.4.6

more releases

Compatibility and interoperability

Compatibility and interoperability for the exchange of map data between NDS compliant systems is the key objective of the NDS format.

Separation of application software & map data

In today’s navigation systems the application software and the map data are combined. A separation of the two creates the desired flexibility between NDS compliant systems.

Updates

At present, a variety of different update media and several update mechanisms are available for several in-car systems or mobile clients. NDS provides a harmonised format for different systems, and flexibility regarding map composing and map update.

Further features / objectives

Beside the features mentioned above, NDS assures:

• World-wide usability
• Format compactness and efficiency
• Support of different distribution and work media
• Map enhancements like 3D objects and detailed maps for cities as well as driver assistance functions
• Flexibility in terms of extension and inclusion of proprietary data
• Prevention of illegal copying
• Validation of the format interoperability by a conformance checking tool