An increasing number of cities and companies are building virtual 3D city models for different application areas like urban planning, mobile telecommunication, disaster management, 3D cadastre, tourism, vehicle and pedestrian navigation, facility management and environmental simulations. Furthermore, in the implementation of the European Environmental Noise Directive (END, 2002/49/EC) 3D geoinformation and 3D city models play an important role. In recent years, most virtual 3D city models have been defined as purely graphical or geometrical models, neglecting the semantic and topological aspects. Thus, these models could almost only be used for visualisation purposes but not for thematic queries, analysis tasks, or spatial data mining. Since the limited reusability of models inhibits the broader use of 3D city models, a more general modelling approach had to be taken in order to satisfy the information needs of the various application fields. CityGML is a common semantic information model for the representation of 3D urban objects that can be shared over different applications. The latter capability is especially important with respect to the cost-effective sustainable maintenance of 3D city models, allowing the possibility of selling the same data to customers from different application fields. The targeted application areas explicitly include city planning, architectural design, tourist and leisure activities, environmental simulation, mobile telecommunication, disaster management, homeland security, real estate management, vehicle and pedestrian navigation, and training simulators. CityGML is designed as an open data model and XML-based format for the storage and exchange of virtual 3D city models. It is implemented as an application schema of the Geography Markup Language 3 (GML3), the extendible international standard for spatial data exchange and encoding issued by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the ISO TC211. CityGML is based on a number of standards from the ISO 191xx family, the Open Geospatial Consortium, the W3C Consortium, the Web 3D Consortium, and OASIS. CityGML defines the classes and relations for the most relevant topographic objects in cities and regional models with respect to their geometrical, topological, semantical, and appearance properties. “City” is broadly defined to comprise not just built structures, but also elevation, vegetation, water bodies, “city furniture”, and more. Included are generalisation hierarchies between thematic classes, aggregations, relations between objects, and spatial properties. CityGML is applicable for large areas and small regions and can represent the terrain and 3D objects in different levels of detail simultaneously. Since either simple, single scale models without topology and few semantics or very complex multi-scale models with full topology and fine-grained semantical differentiations can be represented, CityGML enables lossless information exchange between different GI systems and users.     «

An increasing number of cities and companies are building virtual 3D city models for different application areas like urban planning, mobile telecommunication, disaster management, 3D cadastre, tourism, vehicle and pedestrian navigation, facility management and environmental simulations. Furthermore, in the implementation of the European Environmental Noise Directive (END, 2002/49/EC) 3D geoinformation and 3D city models play an important role. In recent years, most virtual 3D city models have b...     »