Floor-aware maps

Available for an ArcGIS organization licensed with the Indoors extension.

The term floor aware applies to maps and scenes that contain indoor GIS data representing floor plan features that are organized hierarchically such that features are associated to a level, levels are associated to a facility, and facilities are associated to a site. ArcGIS Pro and other apps and APIs that support floor-aware maps and scenes can use these associations to enable intuitive visualization and analysis of indoor data. For example, you can use floor-aware maps to do the following:

  • Visualize space use in a large office building to determine where changes to office assignments would improve team proximity, maintain social distancing requirements, and conserve resources.
  • Track wheelchairs, mobile defibrillators, and other critical assets in a medical facility and help staff identify the nearest available resources and the quickest route to reach them.

A floor-aware map or scene must include, at a minimum, a layer representing facilities and a layer representing levels. These layers must include specific fields that identify the features and define their hierarchical relationships, such as which levels are associated with a given facility. A map or scene becomes floor aware when these layers are specified on the Indoor Layers tab on the Map Properties dialog box.

You can optionally set the map's indoor layers properties to use a polygon layer representing sites, such as college campuses, to define collections of facilities. Units (such as rooms or hallways), architectural details (such as doors, walls, restroom stalls, or windows), assets (such as HVAC, wheelchairs, or hand sanitizer stations), work orders, and other point, line, and polygon feature data can become floor aware provided the features have an associated level. You can define these additional layers as floor aware by setting the layer's Floor Field property.

You can share floor-aware maps and scenes to ArcGIS Online and use the floor filter in the Map Viewer Beta. Sharing floor-aware maps and scenes is not supported for ArcGIS Enterprise at the current release.

Schema requirements

An indoor dataset created using tools available with the ArcGIS Indoors license provides a well-defined schema for loading and maintaining floor plan data in an indoor GIS, but it is not required. You can define the map's indoor layers properties with any site, facility, and floor layers that contain the required attribute fields.

You can define additional feature layers as floor aware as long as they contain an attribute field that defines the level on which each feature is located. This allows you to easily relate data from other business systems, which may have a schema that differs from the Indoors model, to your floor plan data.

Floor filter

Once you define your map or scene as floor aware in the map's properties, you can use an interactive floor filter to explore floor-aware data based on the configured sites, facilities, and floors layers.

The floor filter allows you to filter the floor plan data displayed in your map or scene to a site, a facility in the site, and a level in the facility. It can filter additional data such as architectural details, assets, or work orders that include level information and are configured as floor-aware layers. For example, you can filter a map with multiple campuses to visualize a single campus, a facility on that campus, and all the floor-aware features on a specific floor of that facility.

Use the floor filter to filter by floor in a scene

The floor filter works in conjunction with other filters to further control visualization, such as definition queries, selection, range, and time. For example, you can visualize which conference rooms on a level have events scheduled for a given time span. You can interactively select features filtered by the floor filter to use in subsequent exploration, analysis, and editing of your data. You can also use the floor filter to create layouts for your data and export the layout to print or share your work.

Supported layer and geometry types

You can define layers as floor aware from file and enterprise geodatabases, from feature services, or from an external system for features such as assets, work orders, occupants, or events.

You can configure sites, facilities, and floors in a map's indoor layers properties for layers with a polygon geometry type. You can configure the indoor layers properties for scenes using feature layers with either a polygon or multipatch geometry type.

Additional layers can be configured as floor aware by setting the Floor Field property on the Floors tab of the Layer Properties dialog box. The following geometry types are supported for floor-aware layers:

  • Point (maps and scenes)
  • Line (maps and scenes)
  • Polygon (maps and scenes)
  • Multipatch (scenes only)

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