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.

I already heard that there might be legal problems on uploading this data to OSM. I’m sorry that we will not upload the maps to OSM because of this ‘maybe legal threat’. I would be happy if someone has arguments that it is no problem to upload these maps. We focus on indoor-navigation, but if we can do it, we want to do navigation from someones home, to a location inside a building (wanted by users) and it would be easier if we could just set OSM as data-source and don’t need to merge OSM-data with our indoor-maps.