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OpenStreetMap is an effort to create and distribute free geographic data, such as street maps, but also indoor maps of public buildings, albeit indoor support is still rudimentary. OpenStreetMap allows wiki-style editing, thereby enabling everyone to contribute easily. Map data from OpenStreetMap can be accessed as an XML structure consisting of nodes, ways, areas, and relations, which can be annotated with arbitrary key value pairs.
Indoor nodes can be annotated using a combination of the following keywords:
- indoor=yes marks an object as being indoors.
- level=* designates the associated level or floor of an object.
- wheelchair=yes indicates accessibility by wheelchairs.
- highway=steps denotes steps with the additional keyword step_count=* providing its length.
- highway=elevator labels elevators, connecting different floors.
- highway=door specifies a node to be a door. building=entrance as a special case denotes the entrance door to a building.
- name=* is used to give an object a common name.
The popularity of OpenStreetMap allows us to make use of a variety of tools, e.g. JOSM, to create and extend maps incrementally. The OpenStreetMap community has already mapped the vicinity of our building in great detail, easing our task to integrate our indoor maps, which we derived from floor plans with outdoor footpaths and streets. Editing paths lying on top of each other, i.e., in different floors, is still cumbersome. We alleviated this by creating one distinct map file per floor, and annotating nodes to be merged with a node in another layer with the keyword merge_id=*. This can easily be mitigated by extending JOSM with a better indoor support plugin.
http://youtu.be/RQhrvT2hUAc?hd=1
We published FootPath at IPIN 2011. The paper is available from http://www.comsys.rwth-aachen.de/fileadmin/papers/2011/2011-IPIN-bitsch-footpath-long.pdf. You can cite us using the following bibtex fragment:
@Inproceedings { 2011-ipin-bitsch-footpath-long,
author = {Bitsch Link, J{\'o} Agila and Smith, Paul and Wehrle, Klaus}
title = {FootPath: Accurate Map-based Indoor Navigation Using Smartphones},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN), Guimaraes, Portugal},
year = {2011},
month = {9},
day = {21},
pages = {1--8},
publisher = {IEEE},
event_place = {Guimar{\~a}es, Portugal},
event_name = {2011 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN)},
event_date = {21-23 September 2011},
language = {en},
reviewed = {1},
}You can download a current version as an apk, but keep in mind there is no guarantee, see the License (GPLv3), section 15, 16, and 17.