Undergraduate Vacation Employment - Open Room Map

The OpenStreetMap project is a highly successful example of the power of using people as sensors - users of the site have collected GPS traces and annotated these with street names aiming to construct a free, open map of the world. See for example the OpenStreetMap of Cambridge compared with the Google Maps version: OpenStreetMap versus Google Maps.

This project aims to begin to develop the software infrastructure to allow people to enter the details about the insides of buildings.

One interesting use of this data is to explain energy consumption: if I have a large number of buildings (for example, the University estate), how do I know which buildings have a reasonable energy consumption and which have a consumption which is too large - one means is to estimate what the consumption could be based on the building type, its occupancy and the appliances therein. OpenRoomMap would allow people to maintain this is an open distributed way. Other useful applications include s office and space allocation, location of telephones and workstations.

Entering data about the inside of a building is an interesting constraint problem: for example, if I move a wall it affects the room on either side of a wall. Trust, change-logs and undo facilities will all be vital too for a distributed implementation.

We have built a prototype implementation using Flash suitable for the occupants of the William Gates Building to enter the state of their offices. This project seeks to extend this prototype to allow the editing of building layout as well as office contents.

Software development will most likely be in Flash with server side components written in Java. Prior experience with Java is essential and Flash/HTML/Javascript preferable but non-essential.

Project supervisor: Dr Andrew Rice