Indoor GIS Solution for Space Use Assessment

Abstract As GIS and computing technologies advanced rapidly, many indoor space studies began to adopt GIS technology, data models, and analysis methods. However, even with a considerable amount of research on indoor GIS and various indoor systems developed for different applications, there has not been much attention devoted to adopting indoor GIS for the evaluation space usage. Applying indoor GIS for space usage assessment can not only provide a map-based interface for data collection, but also brings spatial analysis and reporting capabilities for this purpose. This study aims to explore best practice of using an indoor GIS platform to assess space usage and design a complete indoor GIS solution to facilitate and streamline the data collection, a management and reporting workflow. The design has a user-friendly interface for data collectors and an automated mechanism to aggregate and visualize the space usage statistics. A case study was carried out at the Purdue University Libraries to assess study space usage. The system is efficient and effective in collecting student counts and activities and generating reports to interested parties in a timely manner. The analysis results of the collected data provide insights into the user preferences in terms of space usage. This study demonstrates the advantages of applying an indoor GIS solution to evaluate space usage as well as providing a framework to design and implement such a system. The system can be easily extended and applied to other buildings for space usage assessment purposes with minimal development efforts.