Team Spotlight

Keri Brennan

Product Manager

What do you find most exciting about the technology advancements utilized in GeoComm Indoor Maps?

With over 125 million buildings in the United States and only about 1% currently mapped and accessible for public safety and first responders, indoor maps are the great unmapped territory. Today, we take for granted that a telecommunicator can find us. With advances in technologies, first responders can get to the right building quickly, however, getting to the right floor and unit in a very large building is critical to quickly respond to emergencies. We are moving towards a time when not only are we utilizing 3D information (z-axis) to help locate which floor we are on, but in the next few years, we will begin to visualize spaces in 3D as well. Smart Cities, Digital Twins and 3D information are the way of the future and indoor maps is a key cornerstone to working with this critical information.

John Brosowsky

VP of Innovation

What do you find most exciting about the technology advancements utilized in GeoComm Indoor Maps?

Indoor mapping in both two and three dimensions is exciting to me as it’s a whole new frontier for GIS. Today the outdoors is fairly well mapped across the United States, but the indoors represents a vast and largely uncharted geography that our nation’s emergency responders must deal with on a daily basis.

According to The National Human Activity Pattern Survey (NHAPS), the average U.S citizen spends over 80% of their life indoors. William R. Ott, a physical scientist at NIST, has observed that humans are basically an indoor species. A challenge for 9-1-1 is that today over 80% of all 9-1-1 calls now originate from cell phones, and historically cell phone location technology has not worked well indoors. Fortunately, several years ago the FCC realized this and imposed new rules on our nation’s wireless carriers to begin determining more accurate locations of cell phones during 9-1-1 calls, including indoors and in 3-dimensions.

Today, we are finally beginning to see this new, raw, positioning data arrive natively with many 9-1-1 calls from cell phones. But in order to maximize use of this new positioning data to reduce response times and save lives, indoor maps are needed. A big challenge here is that there are A LOT of buildings in the world. There are over 125 million in the United States, over 12 million in Canada, around 20 million in Mexico, and around 20 million in the U.K, just to name a few. We don’t have to map every single-story single family residential home or backyard storage shed, but even if we only map large public buildings where a significant emergency incident could have a large impact on human life and the community, that’s still many millions of buildings!

As a result, GeoComm has been hard at work to decrease costs and time for creating indoor maps for emergency response. I am very excited about and proud of the progress GeoComm has made in massively scaling up our indoor mapping capabilities, including multiple patents GeoComm has been awarded in this area. I believe many local, state, and federal government agencies are going to begin mapping more and more buildings to make them safer for the public during emergencies. A big trend that GeoComm can help with, for example, is mapping all K-12 public and private schools in a state for 9-1-1, for a low cost, and in an on-going economically sustainable fashion to keep the indoor maps up to date over time as buildings change.

Indoor mapping and positioning of emergency callers is just the beginning, and I think we will see indoor maps become a platform also for indoor emergency responder location tracking, indoor routing and wayfinding, and IoT sensor feed mapping that can show alarm status, and other useful sensor detections inside of a building such as human occupancy counts inside rooms.  In this way, smart buildings will become like participants in an emergency response. So, to sum it all up, this is a really exciting time the history of our nation’s 9-1-1 system.

If you’re reading this and are a 9-1-1 / public safety systems vendor and need to add indoor maps into your apps, give GeoComm a call, we can help!  And if you’re a local, state, or federal government, or a private enterprise, who needs to get indoor maps built to support life safety and security applications, by all means please give GeoComm a call – we would love to talk to you more about how we can help you get started.

Dan Craigie

Strategic Development Director

What do you find most exciting about the technology advancements utilized in GeoComm Indoor Maps? 

With the influx of data and content in emergency communications, data interoperability will be a key driver of success and adoption. Like traditional base maps and aerial imagery, indoor maps can provide a foundational layer of location intelligence to public safety agencies no matter their jurisdiction or affiliation. Any entity responding to an emergency event should be working from a common operating picture and that’s what GeoComm Indoor Maps does for indoor 9-1-1 calls. 

Annaliese Heinicke

West Coast Territory

What is the greatest value indoor maps provides the public safety industry?

Indoor Maps are one of those things that seem so innate yet missing from most dispatch centers. We can open our phones and see a map of an airport right in our maps; why can’t that same ability be available to 9-1-1 and others in times of crisis? The advent of intensely accurate mobile callers has only highlighted the necessity of being able to navigate indoors. We often say, “seconds save lives”, but when it comes to navigating and managing an incident indoors, the ability to see what that interior landscape looks like really can save minutes. A highlight of GeoComm’s Indoor Mapping is bringing that interior landscape into the mapping applications used in 9-1-1 today. However, I feel the real power is in the activation of the situational awareness and native intelligence those maps can bring to a call’s response: from navigation to threat tracking, to available resources on-site.

Steve Henningsgard

Site Reliability Engineer

What is your role on the GeoComm Indoor Maps team?

My role with the GeoComm Indoor Maps team is to facilitate any technology needs they have, and to occasionally act as a third-party developer testing their onboarding.

Gianna Miggins

Software Engineer

What is the greatest value indoor maps provides the public safety industry?

The greatest value indoor maps are providing the public safety industry is innovation. We are aiming to provide a new layer of GIS data to help save lives. This shows the industry how we can be using different forms of data to create useful and necessary descriptions of the location of a caller in need. This is only the beginning of this process, and we will continue to innovate.

Jalen Olney-Dixon

Software Engineer

What is the greatest value indoor maps provides the public safety industry?

In my opinion, the greatest value in indoor maps is the ability to reduce the time anyone can be helped on their worst day. Every second matters.

Doug Parent

GIS Specialist

What is your role on the GeoComm Indoor Maps team?  

On the indoor maps team, I work directly with customers, primarily Denco 9-1-1, to obtain and review floor plan documents for processing and building indoor maps for delivery. I also help with testing and feedback for our software developers to help improve the functionality of our indoor processing tools. I also aid in the training and development of new hires and interns as they join our team.  

Todd Pieper

VP of GIS & Project Management

What is your role on the GeoComm Indoor Maps team?   

I am the Vice President of GIS and Project Management. I work directly with the indoor maps team to ensure successful delivery of indoor maps to our customers.

Asher Roemeling

GIS Specialist

What is the greatest value indoor maps provides the public safety industry?

Indoor maps allow officers in the field to see floor plans interactively. This provides the public safety industry with the ability to locate people in need wherever they are located and efficiently help without needing to figure out the best path in a building on-the-spot. 

Jeff Rogholt

Software Engineer

What is your role on the GeoComm Indoor Maps team? 

The GIS Engineers and Software Engineers of the indoor maps team have worked closely together to identify and automate several manual tedious steps with the goal of reducing the time it takes to create vector tiles and/or mobile map packages of building’s indoor data. Most of the automation is developed in an ArcGIS Pro Add-In, named Indoor Maps Toolkit, and other automation features use AWS services.   

Jody Sayre

VP of Public Safety GIS Content & Services

What is the greatest value indoor maps provides the public safety industry? 

Indoor maps improve visualization and interoperability for 9-1-1 call takers and first responders- to not only provide the building information of an incident but also the precise location within a building which will aid in decreasing emergency response times when every second counts.   

Ryan Thomas

VP of Engineering & Technology

What do you find most exciting about the technology advancements utilized in GeoComm Indoor Maps?

I get excited about using emerging indoor Public Safety Grade GIS data to help locate emergencies within a building. The potential for new indoor data correlations and insights could be transformative for indoor emergency response.   

Tyler Thompson

Strategic Accounts & Partnerships

What is your role on the GeoComm Indoor Maps team? 

My role on the GeoComm Indoor Maps team is to engage and support select industry partners in the adoption and use of indoor maps within their public safety applications for their customers.   

Marc Trinks

GIS Manager

What do you find most exciting about the technology advancements utilized in GeoComm Indoor Maps?

Up until a few years ago, 9-1-1 call takers could pinpoint your location down to a few city-block radius at most. With the advent of new technologies, we can now visualize a caller in the correct room of a building. Couple this with an indoor map, and you can now tell that the caller is in the closet in the back of room 256 on the second floor. These advances have all happened in just a few short years! The new generation of technology will allow us to show caller locations in 3 dimensions and allow for a whole new set of interactive tools within the once-static 2-dimensional paper style maps that users are accustomed to. Being part of the development of these new and creative ideas to assist responders in doing their jobs is what excites me most!

Tim Welle

Product Manager

What do you find most exciting about the technology advancements utilized in GeoComm Indoor Maps?

It’s exciting that our technology enables our team to create high quality indoor maps at a low cost, which gives PSAP’s another item for their toolbox to reduce emergency response times.

Ethan Credle

GIS Project Manager

What is your role on the GeoComm Indoor Map team?

My primary role is to provide superb Project Management services to GeoComm Indoor Mapping projects, therefore, ensuring high customer satisfaction and project success.

Katie Mueller

GIS Specialist

What do you find most exciting about the technology advancements utilized in GeoComm Indoor Maps?

One of the most exciting advancements is the increasing accuracy and level of detail that can be captured in indoor maps. In emergency situations, every second counts, and being able to quickly locate people who are in need of assistance is essential!

Ziying Cheng

GIS Technician

What is the greatest value indoor maps provides the public safety industry?

The greatest value of indoor maps for the public safety industry is enhanced emergency response and improved situational awareness. Accurate indoor maps help first responders locate and navigate within buildings more efficiently during emergencies. This can save crucial time in locating individuals in distress and devising safer evacuation routes. Meanwhile, indoor maps provide dynamic information about a building’s layout, allowing public safety personnel to quickly understand the environment they are entering. This awareness enables them to make more informed decisions during critical situations.

Kayla Franklin

GIS Technician

What do you find most exciting about the technology advancements utilized in GeoComm Indoor Maps?

Being new to the company, I am getting to experience this technology for the first time. I also work as a volunteer firefighter in my hometown and have built many preplans for the schools in our district. There is no comparison to what GeoComm is producing. Our district would look at aerial imagery and draw lines based on what we thought was best, even for interior rooms. I also have responded to many calls in our main town to areas I am not familiar with. Critical time getting to a 9-1-1 call is wasted when trying to find where they are located. Numbering conventions for buildings are never consistent with what common sense would dictate. It is truly exciting what these indoor maps can provide and the time they save. The system is truly incredible with the situational awareness it provides for first responders.

Jayna Wanamaker

GIS Technician

What do you find most exciting about the technology advancements utilized in GeoComm Indoor Maps?

I find the indoor modeling capabilities of LiDAR in Iowa schools to be the most exciting technological advancement, and I am thrilled to be learning more about it as I work on the State of Iowa project!

Adam Satushek

GIS Technician

What is your role on the GeoComm Indoor Map team?

In my role as a GIS Technician, I am currently focused on the State of Iowa Critical Incident Mapping project to create indoor maps of K-12 schools in the state. My specific role involves preparing materials for onsite visits by the field crew and processing the data they collect to generate high quality indoor maps that can be used by the schools and first responders in the event of an emergency. I am honored to a part of this important project that will provide an invaluable resource when seconds count.

Maritza Salinas

GIS Technician

What is your role on the GeoComm Indoor Map team?

I am excited to be a GIS Technician for GeoComm! Not only are we working on enhancing public safety, but also, I get to interact with customers while providing an added sense of security. It reminds me of how critical this role is and drives me to do my best.

Kellsey Schilly

GIS Application Engineer

What do you find most exciting about the technology advancements utilized in GeoComm Indoor Maps?

I find it exciting that indoor maps can be integrated with various technologies. This integration enhances tracking and monitoring capabilities, allowing responders to receive data about the movement of people and potential hazards within buildings.

Nick Oppedal

GIS Technician

What is your role on the GeoComm Indoor Map team?

I travel to different schools in the State of Iowa to verify floorplans and record safety points of interest. This information will be provided to 9-1-1 call centers where operators will use the detailed information to better help callers and first responders.

Colin Kelly

GIS Application Engineer

What is your role on the GeoComm Indoor Map team?

I am a GIS Application Engineer on the State of Iowa project. My main role is to help create various out of the box Esri products showcasing GeoComm School Safety, as well as help manage customer support and customer profiles in our ArcGIS Online environment.

James McDermott

GIS Technician

What is the greatest value indoor maps provides the public safety industry?

The greatest value indoor maps provides the public safety industry is speed. Clear spatial data helps remove any doubt of where first responders are needed, allowing them to respond to emergencies more quickly.

Natasha Farina

GIS Technician

What do you find most exciting about the technology advancements utilized in GeoComm Indoor Maps?

The most exciting aspect of the technology advancements in indoor maps is their potential to revolutionize public safety and emergency response, particularly for 9-1-1 responders. What makes this even more thrilling is that indoor mapping is a relatively uncharted territory within the world of technology.

Sam Jotzke

GIS Technician

What is your role on the GeoComm Indoor Map team?

My role with the GeoComm Indoor Maps team, is as a Field Crew Leader. My tasks for this position have included learning the process of on-site data collection and completing data collection. This process involves using Field Maps and SiteScape. I train new field crew members on the on-site data collection process, contact school points-of-contact, and schedule GeoComm’s on-site visits for our field crew members. I also attend our Indoor Maps team meetings, provide input and review of school floor plans, and help review and update the on-site data collection procedures.

Mohamed Elsadig

GIS Technician

What do you find most exciting about the technology advancements utilized in GeoComm Indoor Maps?

In working hands-on with the indoor mapping applications we utilize on a daily basis, I have realized just how far the technology has advanced. In the last few years alone, indoor mapping has become a huge point of contention and focus for industry leaders in public safety and community planning, resulting in fierce competition. The days of relying on outdated, hand drawn maps for most safety implementations are quickly coming to a close. Although I too learned the lost art of drafting as a student, these days mobile mounted LiDAR scanning units can be brought in to seamlessly map building interiors with pinpoint accuracy in a matter of minutes, piece by piece.

For me personally, it is the bridging of indoor and outdoor spaces that feels most alive in my line of work. Nothing excites me more than seeing new applications for innovative indoor safety mapping come to life. I am reminded of many discussions with my GIS classmates during our undergraduate studies exploring the idea of what future safety mapping could look like. Not just for students and patrons of businesses, but also the general public when it comes to communal gathering spaces and the inherent dangers present, especially in the event of medical, weather related, or other unexpected emergencies.

To summarize, I am beyond excited about the possibilities that lie in developing new technologies that bridge indoor and outdoor safety mapping, and the ways that innovative safety measures can be incorporated into simple, straight forward user interfaces. I envision downloadable user applications for smart devices or other wearable technologies, such as wrist bands distributed at live music festivals. Add to that the potential of ever advancing biometric health monitoring that presently exists in a plethora of devices, and the possibilities for integrative safety mapping between the end user, administrator, and emergency responders are quite literally endless. I see this level of mobile, modular indoor / outdoor safety mapping technology coming to market at the forefront of the industry within 3 to 6 years.