ISPRS-Annals

ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences

ISPRS-Annals

ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.

2194-9050

Copernicus Publications

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/isprs-annals-IV-2-W1-47-2016

DEVELOPMENT OF A 3D WEBGIS SYSTEM FOR RETRIEVING AND VISUALIZING CITYGML DATA BASED ON THEIR GEOMETRIC AND SEMANTIC CHARACTERISTICS BY USING FREE AND OPEN SOURCE TECHNOLOGY

Pispidikis

¹ Dimopoulou

School of Rural and Surveying Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, 9 Iroon Polytechneiou str, 15780 Zografou, Greece

05 10 2016

IV-2/W1 47 53

2016

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The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/IV-2-W1/47/2016/isprs-annals-IV-2-W1-47-2016.pdf

CityGML is considered as an optimal standard for representing 3D city models. However, international experience has shown that visualization of the latter is quite difficult to be implemented on the web, due to the large size of data and the complexity of CityGML. As a result, in the context of this paper, a 3D WebGIS application is developed in order to successfully retrieve and visualize CityGML data in accordance with their respective geometric and semantic characteristics. Furthermore, the available web technologies and the architecture of WebGIS systems are investigated, as provided by international experience, in order to be utilized in the most appropriate way for the purposes of this paper. Specifically, a PostgreSQL/ PostGIS Database is used, in compliance with the 3DCityDB schema. At Server tier, Apache HTTP Server and GeoServer are utilized, while a Server Side programming language PHP is used. At Client tier, which implemented the interface of the application, the following technologies were used: JQuery, AJAX, JavaScript, HTML5, WebGL and Ol3-Cesium. Finally, it is worth mentioning that the application’s primary objectives are a user-friendly interface and a fully open source development.