State-of-the-art 3D GIS: System Development Perspectives

Since the mid-1990′s, researches on 3D GIS have been regarded as one of main issues both in the academic sites and commercial vendors; recently, some prototyped systems or the first versioned software systems of commercial basis are being reported and released. Unlike conventional 2D GIS, which consists in intelligent structured GIS or desktop GIS, every 3D GIS has its own distinguished features according to data structure-supporting capability, GIS-styled functionality, external database accessibility, interfacing extents with 2D GIS, 3D visualization/texture mapping ability, and so forth. In this study, technical aspects related to system development, SERI-Web3D GIS ver. 1.2, are explained. Main features in this revised 3D GIS can be summarized: 2-tier system model(client-server), VGFF(Virtual GIS File Format), internal GIS import, Feature manager(zoning, layering, visualization evironment), Scene manager(manage 3D geographic world), Scene editor, Spatial analyzer(Intersect, Buffering, Network analysis), VRML exporter. While, most other 3D GISes or cartographic mapping systems may be categorized into 3D visualization systems handling terrain height-field processing, 2D GIS extension modules, or 3D geometric feature generation system using orthophoto image: actually, these are eventually considered as several parts of "real 3D GIS". As well as these things, other components, especially web-based 3D GIS, are being implemented in this study: Surface/feature integration, Java/VRML linkage, Mesh/Grid problem, LOD(Level of Detail)/Tiling, Public access security problem, 3-tier architecture extension, Surface handling strategy for VRML.