With the mass digitisation of information, paper maps were transformed into a digitised format that emerging systems could leverage in order to integrate location data into their functionality. Over time, these digitised outdoor maps were refined to embody more and more semantic information about the relative outdoor space so that applications could better perform context-aware functions.

In supporting context-aware functions, we focus our scope on human-centred functions. The reason we feel that human-centred applications deserve particular focus with regard to indoor maps is because there is huge quality-of-life potential in developing applications that can service human users with location-based services, as a reflection of how reliant we as human users have become on systems providing human-centred location functionality in the outdoor space, such as navigation systems, live tracking systems, among others.

Given the importance of systems having location information indoors, this thesis focuses on the digitised map representation that systems leverage to become more contextually aware of location information. Based on this focus, we define maps to be an analogical representation [8] that is structured in a way that systems can directly access semantic details and navigable links for key areas in the map's described space. Here, semantic details of key areas indicate important positional details, such as room name or coordinate location, relative to the larger described space. Coupled with semantics, navigable links for each key area in the described space indicate which other areas can be directly reached from the current one.

59 pages

Advisors
Khaled A. Harras
Eduardo Feo Flushing

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