Web 3D GIS for Urban Environments

Urban environments like city centers are recognized as one of the most complex systems for modeling. Because of their high density of big buildings as well as their complicated processes, there is the strong need for planning and managing properly. Here, the heavy trend towards web-enabled systems can help to improve communication, organization and decision-making in favor. In the field of urban environments, 2D Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have proven to be a very useful tool. However, since real objects are in 3D, GIS should offer sufficient functionality for dealing with the third dimension as well. Therefore, the intention of our research is to integrate 3D GIS in web-orientated environments in order to provide appropriate applications to urban planners. The aim of this paper is to introduce the current status of Web 3D GIS and most recent trends and developments. First, we will present technologies linked to web-enabled systems. Here, the field of distributed computing in relation to tasks in the field of Geo-Information is most interesting. Therefore, corresponding standards recommended by e.g. the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) will be discussed, too. After that, the paper focuses on 3D data management and corresponding functionality. The third aspect is 3D visualization for web-environments. Different techniques like VRML as well as the problematic task of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to access and query data will be clarified. Finally, the paper discusses bottlenecks of Web 3D GIS and proposes new aspects to solve them.