Point of interest

Most consumers use the term when referring to hotels, campsites, fuel stations or any other categories used in modern automotive navigation systems.

[4][5] While some of these websites are generic, and will collect and categorize POI for any interest, others are more specialized in a particular category (such as speed cameras) or GPS device (e.g. TomTom/Garmin).

Commercial POI collections, especially those that ship with digital maps, or that are sold on a subscription basis are usually protected by copyright.

However, there are also many websites from which royalty-free POI collections can be obtained, e.g. SPOI - Smart Points of Interest, which is distributed under ODbL license.

Reasons for variations to store the same data include: The following are some of the file formats used by different vendors and devices to exchange POI (and in some cases, also navigation tracks): Third party and vendor-supplied utilities are available to convert point of interest data[7] between different formats to allow them to be exchanged between otherwise incompatible GPS devices or systems.