Best practice (if any) for tagging indoor Beacons to OSM

General talk
1

Hi there,

a local shopping mall has installed beacons inside their mall. I have heard that we can tag this beacons in OSM so that they can be detected or identified. Can someone point me to any best practice for tagging beacons for indoor environments.

In the future we know that some train stations will be doing the same thing.

Thanks
Steven

2

Hi,

Try the search on the wiki.
You can find a tag.

3

Hi there, yes I saw this link earlier. I was just checking on this forum whether the wiki describes current best practice or not, or just one of the ways for tagging beacons in indoor environments.

4

There is relatively little indoor mapping of any sort, and these are quite a recent innovation, so there is possibly no real consensus on how to map them. Indoor mapping can be difficult because it is privately owned public space, and you might well get thrown out for doing obvious surveys or taking photographs, in a a of them.

I’m not sure if I saw mention of these, either here, or the talk-gb mailing list, a few months ago, or whether I simply came across them whilst finding about Bluetooth LE.

5

Just to confirm from reading the above, I can assume that there are no other known examples of how people are using Beacons in OSM? I totally understand that there may be an issue with “Privacy”. For example, if anyone starts publishing their UUID information about their beacons in OSM, then this opens up the opportunity for anyone to manipulate these beacons. But, I guess that could apply to anything in OSM.

So, I would be very interested to see if anyone at all is doing anything with beacons as an example of how they could be used.
Thanks

6

I’d not personally read of any, but OSM isn’t very centralised and if (say) someone had written a blog post in Russian 4 years ago I wouldn’t necessarily have heard of it. A quick forum search finds https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=32167 from a couple of years ago; it’s probably also worth searching help.osm.org, OSM diary entries elsewhere at forum.osm.org and the wiki and asking over at osm on IRC.

Edit: Also look at taginfo https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/?key=indoormark&value=beacon and see where these have been used and who’s adding them - perhaps talk to the users about the projects that they are using them for.

Edit 2: As major usage seems to be in Germany I’d suggest looking through the German forum here and also the talk-de mailing list.

7

@SomeoneElse - thanks for the info.