Indoor Mapping Builds a Solid Foundation for Smart Cities
Lots of discussions surrounding the smart city focuses on how it is powered, what kinds of infrastructure it has, what types of sensors it needs to gather big data for analysis and automation… But one thing that is often overlooked, is that modeling and digitizing a smart city is already challenging itself.
Geospatial data is an indispensable part of digitizing the smart city, and it has already been widely used to drive initiatives related to transportation, environmental protection, and health care. However, as the world becomes increasingly urbanized, we are living in indoor spaces 85% of the time, meaning that geospatial data is no longer just about what’s happening outside but what’s happening inside also plays a pivotal role in society.
Indoor geospatial data as an infrastructure for smart city
Indoor spaces can be complicated, like a maze or a labyrinth. In urban centres like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan, buildings are tightly packed, sometimes even stacked and interconnected, with underground passages, hallways, stairwells, and elevators.
The digitization of indoor spaces is so much more than creating a digital representation of the building itself; it’s also about connecting buildings and creating a holistic representation of the entire urban environment.
Apple developed IMDF to provide indoor maps for venues, which is a mobile-friendly, compact, human-readable, and highly extensible data model for any indoor space, providing a basis for orientation, navigation, and discovery.
IMDF has been endorsed as an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard since 2021; the data model builds on top of the GeoJson data format, which is commonly used in a Geographic Information System (GIS). Every point on the indoor map is accurately presented in the world coordinate system (e.g. WGS84). There are many successful implementations worldwide, including shopping malls, airports, university campuses, hospitals, etc.
Citywide indoor mapping is about to be a reality.
We are currently working with the government of Hong Kong to pioneer and develop the database for 3D indoor mapping.
The Lands Department is working on a 3D indoor map project to digitize the floor plan into geospatial data, which covers 1250 buildings over 10m in height in Hong Kong (a total of 53,000). The pilot phase has already been completed, and the second phase is to be completed for the remaining buildings by 2023.
The Development Bureau endeavours to launch a Common Spatial Data Infrastructure (CSDI) by 2022, which aims to build a common spatial data platform for public and private organizations to share and use spatial data. The CSDI will be built on top of a geospatial database from various sources.
For Japan, we are partnering with Kawasaki Heavy Industry. We have covered more than 800 venues in Japan over major cities, including Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, and Hokkaido.
This is one of the indoor maps we have created in Japan — the Osaka Station and its surrounding area. Osaka Station is one of the busiest stations in Japan, serving over 2 million passengers daily, so you can imagine the level of traffic around the area.
Shinjuku Station, with over 3 million people passing through it every day, these stations are a prime example of how an Indoor GIS can help improve the user experience by providing detailed information about each shop. Enhancing the overall walkability of the city with an easy transition between indoor and outdoor environments, and finding the most efficient path between locations.
Conclusion
Indoor mapping and positioning technology have numerous applications in smart cities, but most important of all, they improve everyone’s wayfinding experience.
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