Analysis of Indoor Maps Accounting the Needs of People with Impairments

Digital indoor maps are still in early stages of development but the demand for indoor location-based services is increasing continuously. Especially people with disabilities can benefit from accurate indoor maps with information in regards to the accessibility of indoor environments. Currently there are no widely accepted open standards for the expression of accessibility information in indoor maps. Furthermore, there is a lack of methods to assess if indoor maps comply with the requirements of people with disabilities in terms of orientation and indoor navigation. To address this problem, this paper presents a first analysis of the quantity and quality of indoor maps exemplary for selected cities in OpenStreetMap. The results show that the number of mapped indoor environments in OpenStreetMap is still sparse. On average only one building per city has a completely mapped indoor environment and the number of buildings with accessibility information is even smaller. This indicates that crowd-sourcing approaches should be supported with automated mapping processes and an ongoing analysis of indoor maps accounting the needs of people with disabilities should be conducted in order to ensure the quality of provided indoor geospatial information.