[Talk-GB] Mapping Indoor walkways

[SK53]

Just to follow up Dudley's initial post:

   - It's clear that we need to map at least some indoor walkways and
   passages just to provide rational pedestrian routing.
   - If we want to build comprehensive sets of data for things like
   shopping centres then we also need a way to represent that data too
   - In some places (the one I can think of are mainly in the far east) the
   complexity of uses and levels in some building developments means that
   navigation assistance can be a real need. I found this myself today passing
   from the DLR to the Jubilee Line in Canary Wharf

So broadly I think we have to accept that OSM will have some indoor mapping
like it or not. In the shorter term this inevitably means making some
judicious compromises in how we represent and tag things. For instance in a
2 level shopping centre I've mapped the ground floor shops as areas and the
upper floor ones as nodes: simply because I have no real feel as to how I
can maintain the data if everything was an area or a node.

David's example of using tunnel is a classic example of this kind of
compromise. It's not perfect, but for many purposes it's clear what is
meant. In fact there is a fairly widely used tag
tunnel=building_passage<http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/tunnel=building_passage>which
makes this even more explicit. Thanks to David's work we have a good
collection of various example in Cambridge. I know of one or two shopping
centres/mall which have been mapped in various levels of detail too.

The really hard problems are related to how to map multiple levels with our
current tools, but this doesn't usually impinge on the basic walkway,
although places like the Barbican already show the problem.

Jerry




On 4 April 2014 20:17, Christopher Baines <cbaines8 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 04/04/14 19:40, Dudley Ibbett wrote:
> > I visited the NEC this week and tried using Osmand to navigate between
> Birmingham International Railway Station and the Hilton Hotel.  Whilst the
> map was very helpful and has lots of detail, the suggested route took you
> via roads.  How might you map the walkways through the NEC building which
> would hopefully provide the actual walking route you would take, assuming
> the building is open?  Or is this something that isn't suitable for OSM
> mapping?
>
> Assuming this refers to indoor mapping, indoor mapping and OSM is still
> something that is uncertain, at least in my mind. There is some
> documentation on the wiki regarding how it has been done ([1] and
> similar pages).
>
> I have also been experimenting with this at the University of
> Southampton. I use something similar to [2] to put the data in to OSM.
> The data is very patchy, but you should be able to see some rooms and
> corridors here [2], and the level selector at the bottom right can be
> used to change levels.
>
> 1: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Indoor
> 2: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/IndoorOSM
> 3: http://cbaines.net/sum/#1/20/50.93661/-1.39818
>
>
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