Abstract: A hierarchical approach is proposed to match the corresponding nodes from two different datasets.In this approach,node types are first of all distinguished and described,and the limitations of existing description methods are pointed out.On this basis,structural properties of node and its linked segments are considered to build the three geometric constraints,including distance,topology,and direction.They are further used to filter the candidates for matching reference nodes.Indeed,this process is of a hierarchy.Hence,it is also called a hierarchical approach.An experiment is employed to illustrate the rationality of the approach proposed in this paper.