Using Crowdsourced Indoor Geodata for the Creation of a Three-Dimensional Indoor Routing Web Application

Abstract

Routing services for outdoor areas are omnipresent and also three-dimensional (3D) visualization is quite common within this area. Recent research efforts are now trying to adapt well known outdoor routing services to complex indoor environments. However, most of the current indoor routing systems only focus on two-dimensional visualization, thus only one level can be depicted. Especially multi-level routes therefore lack visualization. Also, most of the (few) existing 3D indoor routing services utilize proprietary software or plugins, thus a widespread accessibility for those services by using common computers or mobile devices is not feasible. Therefore this paper describes the development of a web-based 3D routing system based on a new HTML extension. The visualization of rooms as well as the computed routes is realized with XML3D. Since this emerging technology is based on WebGL and will likely be integrated into the HTML5 standard, the developed system is already compatible with most common browsers such as Google Chrome or Firefox. Another key difference of the approach presented in this paper is that all utilized data is actually crowdsourced geodata from OpenStreetMap (OSM). Such data is collaboratively collected by both amateurs and professionals and can be used at no charge under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL). Our research combines user-generated geo content of the Web 2.0 with future Internet technology for the provision of a ubiquitously accessible 3D indoor routing application.