Bringing Awareness to Campus GIS one Floor at a Time
What is Floor Awareness?
Floor awareness refers to the ability to navigate and interact with indoor GIS data that represents floor plan features within a map or scene. This involves organizing data hierarchically, associating features with specific levels, facilities, and sites, and enabling interaction with floor-level tagging.
Floor awareness is important to university campuses as it allows them to easily visualize individual floor plans from a centralized all-in-one system or database as opposed to individual files or separate systems that might be found in other non-GIS offerings.
Campus Facility Viewer: Combining building photos with the floor-aware Indoor Viewer is a great way to share a high-level overview of facility data with both staff and the general public.
Minimum Requirements for Creating Floor-Aware Maps
To produce a floor-aware map or scene, the minimum requirements are:
- Polygon layers representing facilities and levels
- A hierarchical relationship between units, levels, facilities, and sites
- A configurable layer filtering solution such as ArcGIS Indoors (allows to sort through stacked layers)
- Key attribute fields, such as level ID, facility ID, and site ID
Steps to Create Floor-Aware Maps with ArcGIS Pro
The following steps are needed to create floor-aware maps with ArcGIS Pro using the ArcGIS Indoors
1. Licensing and Database Setup
Configure the ArcGIS Indoors license and create the Indoors database.
2. Configure Floor-Aware Layers
Enable the “Floors” fields within the layer properties for each relevant layer in ArcGIS Pro. A map or scene becomes floor-aware when these layers are specified on the Floor layers tab of the Map Properties dialog box. This setup allows even non-standard layers to become floor aware.
3. Update Associated Attributes
Populate attributes such as facility ID and level ID for each feature to establish the hierarchical relationship.
4. Use Floor Aware features in ArcGIS Pro
Floor-aware maps
With the addition of floor aware tools in ArcGIS Pro, users now have the ability to create and view floor-aware maps, which are maps that contain indoor GIS data that's organized into floor-aware layers. Users can now easily enable floor awareness when working on indoor map updates rather than relying on cumbersome range definitions in ArcGIS Pro for visualizing different floor levels within the same feature layer.
Floor filter widget
This widget is available in Map Viewer when a floor-aware map is opened. It allows you to filter data displayed by feature layers, point scene layers, and 3D object scene layers based on floor levels.
FloorManager class
This class exposes the sites, facilities, and levels of the floor-aware data model in which you can easily drill down by campus and by building into the floor-aware data for any single level in a chosen facility.
5. Publish Layers Using ArcGIS Indoors
Once configured, publish these layers to your ArcGIS Enterprise or ArcGIS Online account to take full advantage of this functionality. (Ensure your portal is licensed for use with the ArcGIS Indoors extension.)
Floor Awareness in Action
Head to my webinar presentation to find real-world examples of floor-aware maps using ArcGIS Indoors. These maps empower users to toggle between different floors within a single building or across multiple buildings on a campus, simplifying indoor data visualization and interaction. This is especially useful for campuses looking to easily better track and monitor space usage or physical assets across their campus.
Campus Space Manager: Floor aware maps can make sharing space usage statistics much easier and more engaging when they add a visual representation of the space.
Conclusion
ArcGIS brings to life some powerful visualization tools and features but floor awareness is one of the most impactful features that the solution offers and demonstrates the best way for campuses to build and manage their floor-aware maps in ArcGIS Pro. Understanding the hierarchy of levels, facilities, and sites, along with populating key attributes, is crucial to producing effective floor-aware maps. From multi-story buildings to extensive campuses, floor awareness significantly enhances GIS capabilities, offering users a seamless experience navigating indoor spaces.
Cloudpoint Geospatial’s campus facilities team can support your organization in making your GIS data floor-aware. With extensive experience in helping campus GIS customers enhance their decision-making capabilities through the power of Esri technology or saving them time by automating CAD to GIS workflows, Cloudpoint’s campus facilities team is focused on creating enthusiastic users of Indoor GIS and helping them build smarter campuses.
Cloudpoint Geospatial is proud to be an Esri Indoor GIS Specialty partner. Contact the team at cloudpointgeo.com/contact or by calling (877) 377-8124.