Abstract: It is one of the important ways for GIS data updating based on map generalization.The critical first step in this way is to identify the correspondences between maps with the same area and to detect the updates.Matching roads for this purpose is studied in this paper.For matching of objects between roads,three matching levels,i.e.the decomposed level,basic level and abstracted level are discovered.Based on the order relationship of this three matching levels,matching of objects are accomplished by a set of algorithms developed.The results of the experiment for matching roads at scale 1∶10 000 and 1∶50 000 show that this method can obtain higher correct rate and meet requirement of updating.