Modernizing a critical campus resource
The University of British Columbia (UBC) is one of Canada’s leading universities, with more than 60,000 students at its Vancouver campus. Spanning more than 400 hectares, the campus includes a large and continually evolving network of buildings, pathways, and outdoor spaces.
For a community of that size, getting from one building to another isn’t always straightforward. For people with mobility constraints, even finding the right entrance can make the journey more complicated.
Many of UBC’s older buildings have stairs at their main entrances. Accessible entrances may instead be located around the back of a building or near a loading dock, making them difficult to find without detailed campus-specific information.
UBC had recognized this challenge decades earlier. Its original wayfinding website, built in 2003, contained detailed accessibility information for every academic building. But the application was static and designed long before smartphone navigation of campus became an expectation.
Replacing it proved difficult. Several previous attempts using out-of-the-box software lacked the important accessibility information available in the original application. Those solutions were ultimately taken down following negative feedback from the campus community.
When Rachel Wiersma joined UBC’s Campus and Community Planning department as GIS Manager in 2014, modernizing campus wayfinding became part of her mandate. The challenge extended beyond the application itself. Spatial information was siloed across departments, much of it stored in CAD, and UBC didn’t yet have the GIS data needed to rebuild the experience.
Working in partnership with UBC’s Centre for Accessibility and IT teams, the GIS team set out to create a modern application that could preserve the valuable accessibility information of the original while making navigation easier for the entire campus community.
Bringing campus data together with FME
UBC’s new wayfinding application works much like a campus-specific version of Google Maps. Users can generate walking and cycling routes, but they can also select an accessible mode designed around the physical realities of the Vancouver campus.
Behind that experience is a continually changing collection of spatial data.
Using FME, UBC integrates source data maintained in its geodatabase and transforms it into the information the application needs. Buildings, sub-buildings, and points of interest are merged, joined, and filtered into a unified point-of-interest layer. FME also creates a crosswalk that connects each point of interest to an entrance, allowing the application to calculate routes from building to building.
See how UBC’s wayfinding application helps users search for destinations and navigate the Vancouver campus.
The application’s accessible mode guides users around stairs and steep slopes, routing them to the nearest accessible entrance with a power door. Door-to-door routing also allows users to navigate directly between appropriate building entrances rather than simply arriving at a general building location.
See UBC’s accessible routing in action, helping users navigate around mobility barriers and find accessible building entrances.
Keeping pace with a constantly changing campus
Building the application was only part of the challenge. Keeping its underlying information up to date is equally important.
UBC’s Vancouver campus changes frequently. New buildings are constructed, older buildings come down, pedestrian connections change, and temporary construction barriers and closures can alter available routes.
FME automates many of the recurring processes needed to keep the wayfinding data current. Once those processes are configured, teams can run updates themselves without relying on UBC’s GIS infrastructure administrator for every change.
For Jeff Burton, Systems Analyst with UBC IT, that autonomy is particularly valuable. Jeff supports the university’s GIS infrastructure, including ArcGIS Enterprise and FME Flow, while Campus and Community Planning manages the wayfinding data and application. With FME automations in place, teams can manage routine data updates independently and only involve Jeff if something goes wrong.
FME also gives the small team a way to repeatedly run complex data-processing tasks as the campus evolves. According to GIS Analyst Tom Lavery, some of these tasks could take an entire day using tools like ArcPro. With FME, the team can configure the processes and rerun them regularly as campus data changes.
A tool that’s reached thousands
The impact of UBC’s wayfinding application is evident in its use across the campus community.
Over the past three years, users have generated 90,000 routes on both UBC’s Vancouver and Okanagan campuses. Of those, 2,300 were accessible routes for users seeking to navigate campus while avoiding mobility barriers.
The application is designed for everyone, whether or not they have mobility constraints. Unlike the original static map built in 2003, it works on mobile devices and doesn’t require specialized GIS knowledge to use.
UBC’s Centre for Accessibility uses the application regularly, particularly at the beginning of semesters when students are learning where their classes are and how to navigate unfamiliar parts of campus.
For Tom, who served as the project’s front-end developer, the goal wasn’t to create an application filled with every piece of GIS information UBC could provide. Instead, the team focused on building a simple, useful tool around a clear purpose: helping people get where they need to go.
Beyond its measurable impact, the project resonated with the team on a personal level. Tom, in particular, was drawn to the project because it let him use technology such as FME to reduce barriers for people navigating campus, a goal he says closely aligns with his values.
By combining detailed accessibility information with automated, up-to-date spatial data, UBC has transformed a decades-old wayfinding resource into a navigation application designed for how its community moves today.
