A semantic model to define indoor space in context of emergency evacuation

Abstract

There have been various ways in which the indoor space of a building has been defined. In most of the cases the models have specific purpose on which they focus such as facility management, visualisation or navigation. The focus of our work is to define semantics of a model which can incorporate different aspects of the space within a building without losing any information provided by the data model. In this paper we have suggested a model which defines indoor space in terms of semantic and syntactic features. Each feature belongs to a particular class and based on the class, has a set of properties associated with it. The purpose is to capture properties like geometry, topology and semantic information like name, function and capacity of the space from a real world data model. The features which define the space are determined using the geometric information and the classes are assigned based on the relationships like connectivity, openings and function of the space. The ontology of the classes of the feature set defined will be discussed in the paper.