Indoor Environments and Geographical Information Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

The increasing dissemination of geographic information systems (GIS) in recent years has broadened the availability and use of geospatial tools, mostly to analyze the spatial data of different territories. A territory can be viewed at different analysis scales, and some buildings are as complex as small cities, presenting the opportunity to use GIS to study the dynamics, patterns, and phenomena within a building. This study presents a systematic literature review of the relevant evidence focused on the utilization of GIS in indoor spaces. To this end, we searched in three scientific libraries following the PRISMA statement guidelines. All phases were analyzed independently by two of the authors and agreement between them calculated through the Kappa statistic. In total, 50 studies were included. A qualitative synthesis was performed, considering the assessment of data and heterogeneity of methodologies within the included articles. Subsequently, the studies were categorized into five groups: indoor management, indoor geospatial analysis, indoor positioning, indoor data acquisition, and indoor spatial data models. The results demonstrate that research on the use of GIS in indoor spaces is still emerging, despite its great potential to help and GIS users, data producers, researchers, or policymakers to improve their work, providing scientific evidence for decision support.