Standards for naming FACILITY_ID in Indoor

[jrangel]

I am creating Indoor maps for an emergency response network and I need help creating or locating standards for the 'FACILITY_ID' naming convention. We are currently creating indoor maps for school and eventually will branch our this effort to other large densely populated building. 

Our industry follows the NENA standards, though I can not find anything related to indoor naming, specifically naming the 'FACILITY_ID' field.

We are using the Indoor extension within ArcGIS Pro. Thanks.

[JasonHineEsri · Accepted solution]

Hi @jrangel --

The FACILITY_ID field is briefly described in the ArcGIS Indoors Information Model. The field name should be "FACILITY_ID" to be compatible with Indoors geoprocessing tools and client apps. A value in the FACILITY_ID field can be any string (data type is Text; max length is 255 characters), as long as it uniquely identifies a facility in the Indoors database. I'm not too familiar with NENA standards, but section 4.2 (starts on page 29 of this PDF) appears to require each Site/Structure to have a globally unique ID (GUID). GUID values (formatted as text strings) should work fine as the FACILITY_ID values.

Another common approach is to make each FACILITY_ID value a unique combination of site (e.g., campus) and facility names, for example: "Harvard.SpanglerCenter", but this approach has its drawbacks (what if a facility gets renamed?) and seems to me to be less well-aligned with NENA standards. Note that there are other fields in the Indoors model for storing human-readable descriptors for each facility (e.g., NAME).