Safe Software announced support in FME for the Indoor Mapping Data Format (IMDF), a new general purpose data model developed by Apple for indoor spaces. Any organization can now use FME to convert their building floor plans into IMDF, which is a key step towards enabling indoor positioning in iPhone and iPad apps. With support for indoor positioning, iOS apps can offer indoor wayfinding, and can help make building operations, resource planning and facilities management much more efficient.
“People spend 90% of their time indoors, and now with support of IMDF it will become much easier to create valuable and productive solutions for indoor spaces,” says Don Murray, President and Co-Founder of Safe Software. “Our data integration and automation technology enables the production and validation of IMDF, thereby supporting the new and growing number of indoor mapping solutions.”
FME is an enabling technology that can be used to create IMDF from existing data. Organizations can use the systems they already have in place, simply converting the data for IMDF without impacting source data. Because venues are always changing, organizations can use the same FME workflow to automate ongoing updates and re-submissions of IMDF.
Computer-Aided Design (CAD), Building Information Models (BIM), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Microsoft Excel, and 400+ additional formats (www.safe.com/integrate) can be used to create IMDF. For example, an organization can use FME to bring indoor mapping data from CAD into Esri ArcGIS Indoors for editing and maintenance, and then set up FME to automatically convert the data from ArcGIS into IMDF.
IMDF can also be converted for use in other systems for visualization and business analysis. This enables IMDF to be used to provide highly accurate positioning for wayfinding, and to be used in combination with other systems to generate business insights, for example by overlaying foot traffic patterns.
FME data integration workflows are built using a graphical user interface. These repeatable, self-documenting workflows can be automatically re-run on demand, on schedule, or in response to source data updates.
Organizations can perform quality assurance checks on IMDF using Safe Software’s free online IMDF Validator tool.