Patent ID: 8830271

Claim:
An apparatus for density smoothing of points-of-interest displayable on an electronic map, the apparatus comprising: a computer-readable medium operative to store: a plurality of predefined zoom levels for viewing a surface; a plurality of divisions that divide the surface; and a plurality of executable instructions that define a plurality of managers, the plurality of managers comprising: a local point-of-interest extraction manager; a centroid determination manager; a centroid surface manager; and a zoom level assignment manager; and a processor in communication with the computer-readable medium and operative to execute the executable instructions that, when executed, cause: the local point-of-interest extraction manager to: extract a plurality of local points-of-interest from a global points-of-interest database for each division of the plurality of divisions; and extract a plurality of prominence values from the global points-of-interest database, wherein each prominence value of the plurality of prominence values corresponds to a local point-of-interest from the plurality of local points-of-interest; the centroid determination manager to: determine a plurality of centroid values from the plurality of prominence values for each division from the plurality of divisions stored in the computer readable medium, wherein: each centroid value is determined as a function of the plurality of predefined zoom levels stored in the computer readable medium; and the plurality of centroid values are grouped according to the plurality of predefined zoom levels; the centroid surface manager to construct a plurality of centroid surfaces from the plurality of centroid values determined by the centroid determination manager; and the zoom level assignment manager to assign a predefined zoom level from the plurality of predefined zoom levels stored in the computer-readable medium to each local point-of-interest extracted by the local point-of-interest extraction manager based on a comparison of the prominence value corresponding to the local point-of-interest with a centroid surface from the plurality of centroid surfaces determined by the centroid surface manager.