An Approach for Integrating Geospatial Processing Services into Three-Dimensional GIS

Three-dimensional (3D) GIS is gaining more and more acceptance among both scientists and the general public. Though powerful in data visualization, 3D GIS is comparatively weak in geospatial analysis. In order to enhance 3D GIS’s analysis capability, we present an approach for integrating geospatial processing services into 3D GIS. The architecture of our approach contains four layers which are the Presentation layer, the Application layer, the Service layer and the Data layer. Two different workflows are designed for this architecture to deal with geospatial tasks of different complexities. We also implement this approach in a 3D GIS project named Digital Chongming Island (DCI), Shanghai, China. By successfully integrating a variety of geospatial processing services into DCI, we have demonstrated that our approach is feasible and effective.