Open Geospatial Consortium to Consider Apple’s Indoor Mapping Data Format as Community Standard

IMDF targets indoor mapping and provides a mobile-friendly, compact, and human-readable data model for any indoor space, providing a basis for orientation, navigation, and discovery.

25 February 2020: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is in the process of ratifying Apple’s Indoor Mapping Data Format (IMDF) as a Community Standard. OGC Members Autodesk, Esri, Google, New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DOITT), Ordnance Survey Limited, and Safe Software support the submission and welcome public comment ahead of the voting period for the Work Item Justification on March 17, 2020.

Apple designed IMDF to deliver indoor maps for thousands of airports and shopping centers around the world, making it possible for users of the Maps app to find their way indoors and discover places to shop and eat. IMDF provides a mobile-friendly, compact, and human-readable data model for any indoor space, providing a basis for orientation, navigation, and discovery. 

IMDF enables many use cases such as multi-level indoor mapping, indoor way-finding, indoor routing, hyper-local search, and indoor positioning. Using Apple MapKit and MapKitJS for cross platform rendering of IMDF, the free, online IMDF Sandbox, and the Indoor Survey app tool for self-enabling indoor positioning, the format has been adopted by many companies and organizations for use in private and public applications. 

Adoption of IMDF by OGC and the wider mapping community would make it possible to create apps and services using the same highly accurate and detailed map data on any app, website, or operating system. Examples include government agencies using an electronic standard of indoor maps data for efficient response to events, hospitals providing mapping guidance to patients, doctors, and visitors, and airports creating a single map that can be easily styled by partners without altering the accuracy of the underlying data.

About OGC Community Standards

An OGC Community Standard is an official standard of OGC that was already available as a widely used, mature specification, but was developed outside of OGC’s standards development and approval process. The originator of the standard brings to OGC a “snapshot” of their work that is then endorsed by OGC membership so that it can become part of the OGC Standards Baseline. 

The Indoor Mapping Data Format (IMDF) Community Standard Work Item Justification is available for review and comment on the OGC Portal. Comments are due by March 17, 2020, and should be submitted via the method outlined on the IMDF Community Standard’s Work Item Justification public comment request page.

About OGC

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international consortium of more than 530 businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities driven to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

OGC’s member-driven consensus process creates royalty free, publicly available geospatial standards. Existing at the cutting edge, OGC actively analyzes and anticipates emerging tech trends, and runs an agile, collaborative Research and Development (R&D) lab that builds and tests innovative prototype solutions to members' use cases.

OGC members together form a global forum of experts and communities that use location to connect people with technology and improve decision-making at all levels. OGC is committed to creating a sustainable future for us, our children, and future generations.

Visit ogc.org for more info on our work.