Leveraging Volunteered Geographic Information and High-Resolution Satellite Imagery in a Web-GIS Framework for Smart Campus Navigation

Micro-scale navigation within academic campuses, government complexes, and scientific facilities represents a significant research and application gap for standard Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) platforms. This gap is primarily driven by the absence of granular internal routing networks and facility-level spatial metadata. Commercial web-mapping applications routinely depict large institutional campuses as featureless geometric boundary polygons, creating geographic voids that lack internal pedestrian walkways and building entry points. This paper presents the technical design, system architecture, and practical deployment of NasrdaNavi, a web-based campus navigation system developed for the National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA) headquarters at the Obasanjo Space Centre in Abuja, Nigeria. Utilizing a hybrid geospatial pipeline, the system integrates localized drone imagery from the NASRDA data pipeline, crowdsourced vectors from OpenStreetMap (OSM), and high-resolution ESRI World Imagery satellite basemaps. These multi-source spatial layers were geometrically cleaned, topologically corrected in QGIS, and served via a lightweight Flask backend and MapLibre GL JS client engine. The single-page application (SPA) executes real-time hardware geolocation tracking, attribute-based point-of-interest (POI) queries, dynamic reachable-area (isochrone) polygon generation, and client-side pathfinding across private institutional road and footpath networks without heavy server-side processing. This study provides a cost-effective, replicable framework for overcoming last-mile campus navigation bottlenecks while operationalizing practical space-to-earth geospatial solutions within Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) guidelines and addressing critical constraints of national spatial data sovereignty.