Safe Software’s FME now supports IMDF FME Automated Data Integration: Helping enable indoor positioning in iOS apps

July 10, 2018, Surrey, British Columbia, Canada — Safe Software today announced support in FME for the Indoor Mapping Data Format (IMDF), a new general purpose data model developed by Apple for indoor spaces.

Any organization can now use FME to convert their building floor plans into IMDF, which is a key step towards enabling indoor positioning in iPhone and iPad apps. With support for indoor positioning, iOS apps can offer indoor wayfinding, and can help make building operations, resource planning and facilities management much more efficient.

“People spend 90% of their time indoors, and now with support of IMDF it will become much easier to create valuable and productive solutions for indoor spaces,” says Don Murray, President and Co-Founder of Safe Software. “Our data integration and automation technology enables the production and validation of IMDF, thereby supporting the new and growing number of indoor mapping solutions.”

FME is an enabling technology that can be used to create IMDF from existing data. Organizations can use the systems they already have in place, simply converting the data for IMDF without impacting source data. Because venues are always changing, organizations can use the same FME workflow to automate ongoing updates and re-submissions of IMDF.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD), Building Information Models (BIM), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Microsoft Excel, and 400+ additional formats can be used to create IMDF. For example, an organization can use FME to bring indoor mapping data from CAD into Esri ArcGIS Indoors for editing and maintenance, and then set up FME to automatically convert the data from ArcGIS into IMDF.

IMDF can also be converted for use in other systems for visualization and business analysis. This enables IMDF to be used to provide highly accurate positioning for wayfinding, and to be used in combination with other systems to generate business insights, for example by overlaying foot traffic patterns.

FME data integration workflows are built using a graphical user interface. These repeatable, self-documenting workflows can be automatically re-run on demand, on schedule, or in response to source data updates.

Organizations can perform quality assurance checks on IMDF using Safe Software’s free online IMDF Validator tool.

More information on the support for IMDF in FME is available at fme.ly/indoors.

Safe Software is one of British Columbia, Canada’s largest software companies with more than 20,000 corporate customers in over 100 countries. Its FME software is the enabling technology used by airports, government agencies, energy companies, engineering firms, and other organizations around the world to integrate data between enterprise systems and automate data processing. Whether organizations need to extract, transform, load, integrate, validate, or share data, FME’s intuitive interface automates data workflows and eliminates coding. The company is headquartered in Surrey, where it was founded in 1993 with the vision of enabling data to be used where, when, and how it’s needed. The growing team is comprised of over 150 passionate people who share the love for freeing data and continue the mission to help organizations experience that freedom.