Ecosystem members and supporting organizations are encouraged to sign on to this Global Statement through the inlocationalliance.org website.
Global Statement for Indoor Maps as Accessible, Open Data
This Statement aims to foster global development of indoor public space venue maps as Open Data to unleash opportunities for i-LBS. The signees of this Statement recommend that i-LBS be based on indoor maps that are readily accessible via agreed upon open standards, and are made available as open data where possible. Indoor venue maps as the basis for i-LBS will benefit multiple societal sectors with particular benefit for indoor emergency response.
Accurate localization positioning technologies are now available for i-LBS. Indoor location systems, when complementing traditional outdoor location positioning solutions, can enable new sophisticated services based on real-time tracking of people or assets.
The Benefits of Indoor Location -- a recent white paper jointly edited by OGC, ILA, and i-Locate, highlights how indoor location technologies can be an essential enabler for radical innovation, facilitating market entry of new companies proposing innovative businesses in a variety of different domains ranging from e-government services to eHealth, from personal mobility to logistics, from facility management to retail, to name but a few. The white paper, based on a global survey, highlighted that one of the key barriers preventing widespread usage of indoor positioning services is the lack of interoperable solutions and practices for indoor positioning. An additional barrier is the availability of open indoor map data of public venues. OGC, ILA and i-Locate and many other organizations seek to eliminate these barriers to widespread i-LBS.
- To address the need for interoperable solutions and practices for indoor positioning, OGC, ILA, and i-Locate working in multiple international communities seek the widespread adoption of effective standards for accessing and using indoor maps.
- The lack of available indoor maps limits the potential and opportunities that location-based service can unleash. OGC, ILA, and i-Locate advocate defining well-acknowledged policies regarding different degrees of accessibility of indoor data. For instance, availability of indoor maps of public places supports freedom of access for other-abled people. Further, availability of indoor maps to first responders increases safety and effectiveness in emergency situations.
Industry alliances, such as OGC, ILA and i-Locate, bring together the industry ecosystem in indoor positioning technology, and provide the skills and the will to solve these issues. They jointly recognize that this requires standardized access to public space indoor maps, wherever possible, as open data. Such access to public space indoor maps will enable small and large businesses, as well as public institutions, to create more efficient and productive organizational models, ultimately delivering more flexible, and easy access to (traditionally closed or tacit) direct field knowledge.
Ensuring open access to public space indoor maps will provide industry and public agencies with a powerful enabler for the next generation of services. Readily accessible indoor maps will be an enabler of exponential growth for indoor location based services.
InLocation Alliance - Formally established August 2012 is a federation member program of the IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization (IEEE-ISTO) and a collaborative industry initiative dedicated to promoting indoor positioning solutions that directly benefit the industry and users of indoor location services and solutions on mobile devices. ILA connects the entire indoor positioning ecosystem in one place.
The OGC® is an international geospatial standards consortium of more than 525 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available standards. OGC standards support innovative, interoperable solutions that 'geo-enable' the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.
Coordinated by Trilogis Srl based in Rovereto, Italy, the i-locate Project helps extend current open standards to support indoor/outdoor Location Based Services based on sound privacy and security policies. The i-locate public geoportal collects, makes discoverable and makes accessible as Open Data indoor spatial information about publicly accessible buildings. i-locate provides the first reference implementation of the OGC IndoorGML Encoding Standard. The i-locate project has been co-funded by the European Commission in the framework of the ICT-PSP (Information and Communication Technology Program). http://www.i-locate.eu/