Hey, this post is giving an update on the students-project I’m currently working on and I posted about it here. The research- and design-phase is now finished and we start writing the app that will offer indoor-navigation with focus on wheelchair-users.

We have decided to use IndoorOSM. I know that this schema is not liked much because it uses the ID of OSM-Elements and we already have problems with this. This decision was made because the people in this project focused on this, their interest is in finishing this project and not giving something back to OSM. If I find enough time I will try to do a map with Simple Indoor Tagging, to have an argument to use that.

For the task to find routes we decided to use the Graphhopper library. My task for this week is to make a connection between the floors. I will first implement this for the IndoorOSM-schema as this is my task and if I find time also for the other schema. If I find the time to implement the ‘Simple Indoor Tagging’ I will have a good argument to switch to that.

We will create maps for 2-3 buildings in this project. Our building at the university as it is where we are all the time, the main-trainstation as the operator of it is interested in this project and maybe a congress-center in this city, because it has challenging architecture and they are also interested. We are using the emergency plans of those buildings. We use the piclayer-plugin for josm. We put the emergency-plan at the right position, where the building already is in OSM and then draw the lines according to that image.

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I’m currently working on a project at my university where we try to build a proof-of-concept-app (android) for indoor navigation with focus on wheelchair-users and their needs. Wheelchair-users have special needs as the width of a door might be to small for the wheelchair, stairs are not usable, ramps might be too steep, find an alternative route if an elevator is ‘out of order’. We are still in the planning phase and currently evaluating what technologies we will use. To create maps of the buildings we will most likely use IndoorOSM-features [0]. The plan is to create the building-maps from emergency-maps (German Wikipedia [1]) if we don’t get better ones. We will use those maps as background in JOSM [2] and draw the buildings with it. As those maps are created by following an official norm I hope, that there is no licensing problem with it as they are not a product of creativity or invention.

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There is already a similar app for outdoor-wheelchair-navigation built at our university, but it is not officially published. We are adding this feature of indoor-navigation and both project will be merged. There are already industry-partners, who are interested in this app. This app will very likely be published some time and not just stay a research-project.
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[0] osm.wiki/IndoorOSM
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flucht-_und_Rettungsplan
[2] https://josm.openstreetmap.de/