Physical spaces are alive with information. Signs change. Departments rename. Routes shift. Yet no single, authoritative record tells every screen, every app, every AI agent what a place is called, where it is, and who can reach it — right now.
Construction solved this problem in 1982. Wayfinding still has not.
"BIM is not a drawing tool. It is the structured, versioned model that every downstream tool reads from and writes to. The model is the asset; the tools are interchangeable."
— The WIM thesis, applied to spatial navigationIn construction, Building Information Modelling (BIM) is not Revit, not AutoCAD, not a drawing. It is the canonical data spine — the authoritative, versioned record — that architects, engineers, fabricators, and facilities managers all read from and contribute to.
Wayfinding has no equivalent. Today, the authoritative record of "what does the sign on Floor 3 say, in which languages, pointing where, valid until when?" is fragmented across 5–8 systems, owned by 5–8 teams, with 5–8 manual update cycles.
The Wayfinding Information Model (WIM) is that missing spine. A structured, machine-readable, versioned record of every identity, name, route, status, and accessibility attribute — published once, consumed everywhere.
Interconnect is the vendor-neutral, API-first platform that maintains and distributes the WIM. Not a CMS. Not a map renderer. Not a sign database. The information layer beneath all of them.
Stable, permanent IDs for places, departments, routes, signs, screens — never change when human-facing labels do.
Lay name, clinical name, abbreviations, all supported languages, terminology synonyms, voice-readable forms.
Georeferenced location and indoor topology (IndoorGML/IMDF-compatible) — where things are and how they connect.
Valid-from, valid-until, open/closed, capacity, gate-change, "now treating" — live temporal state.
EN 17210, ADA, WCAG-aligned attributes: step-free, induction-loop, tactile, low-stimulation routes.
"Department X is reached via Route 3 Blue, Level 3" — the route as structured data, not sign text.
Who changed what, when, with what authority — the validated, auditable record of every update.
Native integrations to third-party tools — Google Maps, Apple Maps, Mapbox, Esri, Mappedin, SignAgent — so the WIM is the authoritative source they all read from, not a silo alongside them.
Every hospital, airport, campus, and stadium pays it daily — in staff hours, passenger confusion, accessibility failures, and broken AI answers. The data is stark.
A TRB field study at Chicago O’Hare recorded 1,046,957 information-booth requests in a single year; 74% were basic directional questions. The researchers concluded that better visual guidance could materially reduce staff burden and help passengers navigate with less time and effort. Research source
In a 6,138-person survey of sports and entertainment attendees, 61% said one of the first things they do on arrival is find their seat, 45% look for a bathroom, and 70% would download an app if it directed them to their exact seat — a clear signal that venue navigation is still unresolved. Research source
The Emory University Hospital estimate remains one of the most-cited benchmarks in healthcare wayfinding: ineffective wayfinding consumed more than 4,500 staff hours per year and cost more than $220,000 annually. Later peer-reviewed reviews continue to cite it as evidence that navigation failures drain care time and operational capacity. Research source
The 2021 concept was right in diagnosis, wrong in timing and substrate. Three things have changed. Then two more arrived. Now is the moment.
World Labs released Marble GA on 12 November 2025 and launched a public World API on 21 January 2026. Fei-Fei Li's thesis — "spatial intelligence is AI's next frontier" — is now infrastructure, not theory. 3D worlds have an API. Physical wayfinding information does not.
World Labs · Jan 2026When a user asks Claude or ChatGPT "where is the cardiology clinic at MUMC+?", the model needs an authoritative, machine-readable answer with confidence and provenance. Today there is no such API. Mapbox's MCP Server (Jan 2026) signals the direction; geocoding alone does not solve it.
MCP · Agents · 2026OGC IndoorGML 2.0 (Nov 2025), CityGML 3.0, IMDF as OGC Community Standard, and EN 17210 collectively make a vendor-neutral data spine technically and politically possible. The substrate is ready.
OGC · Nov 2025Content Management Systems for Sign Systems are isolated. The sign-asset lifecycle and positions are set in physical signs — there is a need to Interconnect information acress physical and digital information layers.
CSM SignAgent · Marketplace 2025The EU Accessibility Act (2025), EN 17210 revision under M/587, NHS productivity targets, and Dutch hospital have created procurement budget for "single source of truth" infrastructure projects.
EU Accessibility Act · 2025 EN 17210 RevisionInterconnect is a vendor-neutral, API-first WIM platform. It ingests from existing systems of record. It validates, versions, and distributes to every downstream channel — physical signs, digital displays, mobile apps, voice assistants, AI agents, and 3D world models.
WIM connects to your existing building systems and reads live data — room bookings, door states, occupancy counts, estate records. Nothing is replaced. Nothing is rebuilt. Data flows in from wherever it already lives.
Every destination gets a single WIM record — eight structured objects covering identity, physical space, navigation graph, live status, accessibility, output channels, events, and payments. One record. One source of truth. Updated in real time.
Change one field — and every output updates instantly. Physical corridor signs, digital screens, the mobile wayfinding app, the kiosk, the voice assistant — all receive exactly what they need, pre-formatted, without any adapter logic in between.
Data sources on the left feed the WIM engine at centre. The engine distributes to every output channel on the right. Drag nodes to explore.
The WIM is not a proprietary format. It is built on top of the international open standards stack that matured in 2024–2025 — making it vendor-neutral, interoperable, and futureproof.
OGC standard for indoor spatial information. Version 2.0 (November 2025) separates the conceptual model from encodings, enabling JSON/GeoJSON serialisation alongside GML.
Indoor Mapping Data Format — Apple's open specification for representing indoor venues. Adopted as an OGC Community Standard in 2021. Used by Mappedin, ArcGIS Indoors, and Mapbox.
Semantic data model for 3D city models, including building topology, land use, and transportation. Bridges the gap between BIM and GIS for complex indoor/outdoor environments.
European accessibility standard for the built environment. Currently under revision via CEN Mandate M/587. Sets first-class accessibility requirements that the WIM must carry as structured data attributes.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — applied to all digital channel outputs of the WIM, ensuring AI agent responses, mobile maps, and kiosk interfaces meet accessibility requirements by design.
Model Context Protocol — the emerging standard for AI agent tool calls (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini). The WIM's AI endpoint exposes structured wayfinding lookups as MCP-compatible tools.
The infrastructure-economy playbook is mature: become the layer everyone builds on, not the app everyone logs into. Wayfinding information has been waiting for that layer.
Open by protocol
The Wayfinding Information Model is an open standard. Anyone can implement it, and no one needs permission to participate — the value compounds in the network, never behind a gate.
Resolution is the unit
The model is organised around the resolved event — one validated WIM update, propagated everywhere it needs to go. Not pages, not seats, not screens. One source of truth, reconciled.
Neutral by design
Interconnect owns neither the maps nor the agents — it's the information layer between them. That neutrality is exactly what lets every channel trust it as the source.
The flywheel
Each new channel connector makes every update more valuable — one validated change now reaches six destinations instead of five. More sources, more channels, more reasons to be the layer everything reads from.
Starting with hospitals — the highest information-change frequency, the most measurable cost of error, the most regulated, and the most touchpoints per square metre. Then every complex space that moves.
"One source of truth
for every place.
Every channel.
Every change."
The information layer beneath every wayfinding system. Not a sign tool. Not a map renderer. Not a CMS. The spine that makes them all consistent.
Apply to work with us. We partner with organizations that take wayfinding seriously, complex environments where clarity is critical and decisions have real impact. We are selective in who we work with, focusing on institutions ready to invest in systems that truly perform.