MapForge

MapForge logo

\section*{Inspiration}

I got the though for the first time when I arrived at the "Mediterranean Village" in Oran, which to my surprise didn't have a proper map that indicates the places of the buildings. I ended up spending about 30 walking around searching for the building where my room is located.

After watching a certain video on Youtube explaining how google maps calculates the different routes and its relation with dijkstra's algorithm, I figured out a way to solve a problem, which is by building my own google maps, but rather than mapping the entire earth, a single organization is mapped, and the map is created by the organization itself to provide to the users a way to walk around.

\section*{What it does}

MapForge is a platform where organizations can build structured indoor maps for their facilities so that users can use them for navigation, I believe everyone has had at least one experience of getting lost inside a building, whether it was the first time to go to university, the first time to visit a certain amusement park or maybe even staying in a big hotel. MapForge is a tool that ensures doesn't happen, an editor can import a blue print to create the map he wants, trace the different building of the organization, add floors to them and create rooms, entrances and other different types of instances inside the buildings. A normal user on the other hand inspects the maps created by the editors and uses them for navigation

\section*{How we built it}

The tech stack i relied on consists of symfony-php for the backend and a create-react-app setup for the frontend.

The backend is responsible for the application logic, persistence, map structure, validation, and routing, while the React frontend provides the visual map editor and navigation interface. The platform uses a graph-based representation of maps, with nodes representing locations such as rooms, entrances, and stairs, and edges representing the connections between them.

For the hackathon, I also integrated WebMCP into the frontend, exposing MapForge's core capabilities as tools that AI agents can use to inspect and modify the actual map state. Routing is handled by a deterministic Dijkstra-based shortest-path system, allowing both users and agents to find routes through the map.

\section*{Challenges we ran into}

Given that I have participated as a solo developer, the main challenge that I ran into was time, I had to brainstorm ideas for the project, determine the core functionalities, what to implement and what to sacrifice, come up with the business logic and of course implement everything by coding the backend, the frontend, the webMCP integration, testing, fixing the different errors and bugs and finally deploying the application. So if anything, I believe that my greatest adversary throughout this challenge was time.

\section*{Accomplishments that we're proud of}

There is nothing that I am particularly proud of, because I am proud of everything, this challenge was by far the greatest experience that I had in my entire life, it helped me learn a lot of new things and concepts including webMCP itself as i wasn't aware of its existence before.

\section*{What we learned}

I learned a lot of things throughout the course of this challenge, but I must admit that the greatest concept was webMCP itself, the main idea of this challenge considering the fact the i didn't know it even existed before this experience.

\section*{What's next for MapForge}

The current version of MapForge can be considered as a draft or a proof of concept if I may say, the perfect version of the project that is in my head would go much further. It would integrate indoor localization, similar in principle to GPS, so that the user could be located inside a building and receive directions from their actual position. Navigation would become much more sophisticated, with support for accessibility-aware routes, multiple route options, complex floor and building transitions, and potentially real-time navigation. The platform would also have a much more robust authentication and authorization system, where organizations control their own maps, administrators only access the maps they are responsible for, and different users can have different permissions. QR codes could also be placed at entrances, rooms, or specific locations, allowing visitors to instantly open the corresponding location in MapForge and start navigating. Other future improvements could include better floor-plan importing and tracing, more detailed building geometry, richer location information, mobile support, and more advanced tools for organizations to maintain and update their maps over time. The WebMCP integration could also become much more powerful, allowing agents to perform more complex maintenance, validation, and navigation tasks while still keeping humans in control.