An essential part of any new Nokia phone, whether it’s the Nokia N97 or the more mainstream Nokia 6700 Classic, is the in-built GPS, to stop you from getting lost, in car or on foot. But it’s not just a case of scanning in a few A-Zs and hooking up to a satellite: there’s even more to Ovi Maps than meets the eye. Ever wondered how all the roads, all the routes and POIs are put together? We took a trip to NAVTEQ’s offices to find out.

NAVTEQ is one of the world’s leading mapping data company, providing info on roads and terrain to loads of big sat-nav companies, as well as Nokia, which owns it. We visited its Watford office, but it has staff all over the country (and the world) to help collect it all. Given how quickly new buildings, new roads and new junctions and one way systems can spring up, it’s a never-ending task.

Every section of every road has to be intricately analysed. Above is a shot of what a town looks like on NAVTEQ’s own internal software. You can’t tell from a glance, but each stretch of road carries an enormous amount of information: 200 different attributes, no less, from which vehicles can drive down it to whether it’s a scenic route or not. Roundabouts meanwhile are even more complex as the map needs to tell the sat-nav software to go around it the right (left) way – easier said than done.

You can’t layout all the data without collecting it first though. NAVTEQ uses these cars equipped with six cameras and gyroscopes to keep track of location even when they’re out of GPS signal – in a tunnel, say. All the photos are geo-tagged to work out exactly where every address and road sign is. And yup, every single road in the country needs to be driven down – it’s easy to see why Navteq has 190 offices scattered across 39 countries.

NAVTEQ’s only just rolled out its Discover Cities tech for Ovi Maps, but what’s next? As well as improving mapping for pedestrian navigation even more (That means knowing what routes there are through every park, and where every bus stop is too), it’s working on bringing realtime traffic updates to Europe. Nokia is already coming up with other solutions for up to the minute traffic on Ovi Maps, but with subscription charges currently in place, could this help make it free? We’ve got our fingers crossed.

Check out the NAVTEQ: the secrets behind Ovi Maps image gallery: