Unlocking Safety: Indoor Mapping Essentials for School Districts
9-1-1 administrators across the country are responding to the need for up-to-date floor plan data for school buildings within their areas of responsibility to provide vital information to first responders and Emergency Dispatch Centers.
Many states are providing funding to help school districts transition from static hard-copy maps and floor plans to dynamic, interactive GIS maps.
In support of this effort, Cloudpoint Geospatial is conducting surveys of numerous K-12 school properties to create floor plans in Indoor GIS format, which can be integrated into 9-1-1 Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) systems.
Existing architectural plans, such as hard-copy drawings or CAD files, can be used as source data for GIS floor plans. However, they typically require scanning, georeferencing, and conversion from CAD to GIS. In addition, existing plans are often years or decades old and no longer reflect the current layout and configuration of the building.
To overcome this, an alternative approach is to conduct on-site scanning or 'reality-capture' using handheld Light Detecting and Ranging (LiDAR) equipment and generate up-to-date floorplans from existing conditions.
Terrestrial LiDAR can create highly detailed 3D representations of built spaces by collecting millions of data points representing the surfaces of objects. The scan data is then used to create updated 2D floor plans representing each building level.
To achieve the level of accuracy and data quality required for public safety mapping, Cloudpoint utilizes professional-grade LiDAR reality-capture equipment capable of achieving sub-inch accuracy with a range of up to 100 meters (328 ft).
With these devices, a typical 70,000-square-foot middle school can be scanned in three to four scans, each taking approximately 20 minutes to complete. GPS survey control points are recorded around the building exterior to geo-reference the scan data.
The scanning equipment also captures front and back photographs at regular intervals, approximately every 10 feet. These images are stitched together during post-processing to create 360-degree panoramic views of the interior and exterior spaces.
The point cloud data is further processed and segmented to extract floor plan information into vector GIS features.
The vector data is then edited and refined in ArcGIS Pro and attributed with building level IDs to enable floor filtering. The final product allows emergency services to visualize building levels one floor at a time.
These GIS data layers provide the basemap upon which school safety plans can be created, including emergency evacuation maps, lockdown procedure maps, storm/shelter-in-place maps, medical emergency maps, accessibility maps, and first responder orientation maps.
School districts can also leverage this data to manage facilities, map building assets, manage interior spaces, and produce maps for student orientation, traffic management, event planning, Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance, and more.
Publishing this data to state 9-1-1 data hubs puts critical information into the hands of dispatchers and first responders, improving response accuracy and efficiency and ultimately enhancing the safety and security of students and staff.
For more information on how to enhance mapping information for your buildings, school district, or campus, contact Cloudpoint Geospatial’s professional services team at cloudpointgeo.com/contact.