When communicating and making user-friendly maps and applications, Points of Interest (POIs) are essential pieces of information. Traditionally, POIs referred to locations that were ‘destinations’, such as landmarks or monuments that people would navigate to, usually over long distances such as by vehicle. Modern POIs with Indoor GIS facilitate navigation and wayfinding inside of buildings, but also provide connectivity, serving as a gateway between your map and your information portal.
What is a POI?
On a large-scale map, a POI could be a city, mountain, or park. Moving down to a site level, such as a campus, a POI could be a tree, monument, or manhole. At a building level, a POI could be a control panel, restroom, or fire alarm. At an asset level, a POI could be a light switch, button, or outlet, for example. POIs are specific locations on a map that are useful or interesting. What this refers to depends on the type and scale of the map.
How are POIs used?
Searching
POIs are grouped or categorized for easy recognition and searchability. Users can easily search by a point ID or by name to quickly identify a point anywhere within a building or even across campus which is particularly easy to deploy wtih Esri’s configurable ArcGIS Indoors solution.
Routing
POIs serve as the ‘nerve endings’ of an indoor GIS routing network ‘nervous system’. POIs are essential for accurately routing pedestrians within a building or connecting them to other buildings on campus. They can even be connected with various external POIs such as automatic entry ways, parking spaces, or tranportation networks to improve ADA accessibility and mobility across campus. When elevation attributes are assigned to points of interest, they can even provide multi-floor level navigation both inside and out.
Symbolizing
Pre-configured style packages can be used in ArcGIS Pro to make symbolization quick, easy, and customizable.
4 Ways to Create POIs
Required Attributes for POIs in ArcGIS Indoors
Certain attributes are required when creating and editing points of interest, particularly for use within ArcGIS Indoors. These include:
Location
Unique ID
Category
Name
Display Scale
Level ID
Vertical Order (ground is 0)
Elevation*
*POIs for Indoor GIS have to be floor-aware, meaning they have an elevation attribute, allowing the POI to be filtered based on floor level. This prevents POIs from being stacked on one another when viewed within a multi-floor level environment.
Choosing POI Icons
Although their are different file formats users can create POI symbols with, Esri recommends that a vector style format such as SVG, because they can scale to different resolutions. Other vector symbols can lose quality and look blurry or pixelated when resized or reformatted to the required resolution.
Categories
When deploying POIs for use with ArcGIS Indoors, GIS professionals should pay careful attention to the needs of the end users and apply appropriate category names to the POI layers. It is imperitive that POI categories be intuitive and easy to interpret by the end user. Below are some sample categories to help get you started.
Places
Safety & Security
Accessibility
Mechanical & Utilities
Furniture & Equipment
Emergency Response
Cloudpoint Geospatial is pleased to be an Indoor GIS specialty partner with Esri and is ready to assist with all of your indoor mapping or ArcGIS Indoors needs.
