Abstract: Incremental updates are used for versioning digital road maps. A base map is provide. A hash function is applied to the base map to generate a version hash of the base map. Map difference bundles are provided, a map difference bundle includes at least one individual change of a map feature. The digital road map is versioned by forming at least one continuous version chain, beginning with the base map. To generate a current map version, a map difference bundle to be applied is linked to the map version in the version chain before the current map version. For this the version hash of the previous map version and the map difference bundle to be applied are input into the hash function as input parameters to generate a version hash for the current map version.