Very interesting. We actually are looking at viable approaches to get usable indoor maps for large buildings currently. We are building map based productivity software for workers in factories and offices. Maps are important for our use case but not the core thing we do. We actually partner with other companies for maps and positioning typically.
Indoor mapping is a hard problem because typical map providers tend to ignore private spaces, which is where maps are most needed. E.g. Apple, Google, Here, etc have great maps for a very limited set of public buildings but they don't really have solutions for indoors.
We know of a few companies specializing in this but it typically involves a lot of manual work and tends to have a high cost, require a lot of hand holding, and some very niche mapping skills. Also, a lot of indoor maps are intended for e.g. architects, contain a lot of clutter, or are generally not well suited for use on e.g. mobile screens.
It's an interesting problem to start tackling because we are getting kind of a critical mass of technology that will be able to start delivering pretty accurate positioning to commodity phones. There are all sorts of things happening in the industry related to that. It's a bit similar to when GPS became common on phones and it became a mass market in a few short years. Before that you had all sorts of niche stuff. After that you had ridiculous amounts of user generated content, open street maps, foursquare, etc.
Hi! If you're looking for a developer friendly indoor mapping suite (both for editing and viewing/navigating), check us out - www.mappedin.com
Totally agree that it's an overlooked problem and we've been quietly working to solve it for years. Early on we realized the key was to build "everyman" mapping tools that facility managers can use themselves to keep data up to date.
We're increasingly focused on our developer-facing tools and I'd love any feedback if you end up taking a look! (https://www.mappedin.com/mapping/sdks/)
Sounds like your company and the company I work for operate in similar areas. We focus on the indoor routing and positioning aspects, but are quite constrained by the effort of converting a floor plan or PDF of a CAD into a map. May be worth us connecting on LinkedIn to see if our companies could mutually benefit each other. My profile is my username here, without the “i am”.
Indoor mapping is a hard problem because typical map providers tend to ignore private spaces, which is where maps are most needed. E.g. Apple, Google, Here, etc have great maps for a very limited set of public buildings but they don't really have solutions for indoors.
We know of a few companies specializing in this but it typically involves a lot of manual work and tends to have a high cost, require a lot of hand holding, and some very niche mapping skills. Also, a lot of indoor maps are intended for e.g. architects, contain a lot of clutter, or are generally not well suited for use on e.g. mobile screens.
It's an interesting problem to start tackling because we are getting kind of a critical mass of technology that will be able to start delivering pretty accurate positioning to commodity phones. There are all sorts of things happening in the industry related to that. It's a bit similar to when GPS became common on phones and it became a mass market in a few short years. Before that you had all sorts of niche stuff. After that you had ridiculous amounts of user generated content, open street maps, foursquare, etc.