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ABSTRACT
Studying and planning urban evolution is essential for understanding the past and designing the cities of the future and can be facilitated by providing means for sharing, visualizing, and navigating in cities, on the web, in space and in time. Standard formats, methods, and tools exist for visualizing large-scale 3D cities on the web. In this paper, we go further by integrating the temporal dimension of cities in geospatial web delivery standard formats. In doing so, we enable interactive visualization of large-scale time-evolving 3D city models on the web. A key characteristic of this paper lies in the proposed four-step generic approach. First, we design a generic conceptual model of standard formats for delivering 3D cities on the web. Then, we formalize and integrate the temporal dimension of cities into this generic conceptual model. Following which, we specify the conceptual model in the 3D Tiles standard at logical and technical specification levels, resulting in an extension of 3D Tiles for delivering time-evolving 3D city models on the web. Finally, we propose an open-source implementation, experiments, and an evaluation of the propositions and visualization rules. We also provide access to reproducibility notes allowing researchers to replicate all the experiments.
Data and codes availability statement
The technical specification of the 3DTiles_temporal extension (as JSON schemas) proposed in this paper is available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3596881. DS-CityGML (section 5) is available at: https://zenodo.org/record/3611354. DS-3DTiles (section 5) is available at: https://zenodo.org/record/3611357. DS-3DTiles-Tmp (section 5) is available at: https://zenodo.org/record/3611403. Detailed notes for reproducing the results of section 5 are available: for section 5.2.1, refer to https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:dir:aa7e1acfe0acd9e9891f42fb52d13be6c0250f36;origin=https://github.com/VCityTeam/UD-Reproducibility; for section 5.2.2, refer to https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:dir:1bb56c2675ad040160a48dc1ad650577a630a86f;origin=https://github.com/VCityTeam/UD-Reproducibility/and for section 5.3, refer to https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:dir:424c7db8cb2435ccfb52f1dbed124f1685d8dcc0;origin=https://github.com/VCityTeam/UD-Reproducibility/.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the LABEX IMU (ANR-10-LABX-0088) of Univ Lyon, as part of the program ‘Investissements d’Avenir’ (ANR-11-IDEX-0007) operated by the French National Research Agency (ANR). We would like to thank Eric Boix for his feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. https://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wfs.
2. https://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wms.
3. See extension/3DTILES_batch_table_hierarchy/folder of the following repository: https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:rev:50ca4c646da460395b0a06ed85d7f54a727e09a5;origin=https://github.com/AnalyticalGraphicsInc/3d-tiles/.
4. See definition of time-span on page 26 of the current official version (6.2.3) of CIDOC-CRM, accessible here: http://www.cidoc-crm.org/sites/default/files/2018-05-16%23CIDOC%20CRM_v6.2.3_esIP%28XDP%29%28XM%29.pdf.
5. See extension/3DTILES_batch_table_hierarchy/folder of the following repository: https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:rev:50ca4c646da460395b0a06ed85d7f54a727e09a5;origin=https://github.com/AnalyticalGraphicsInc/3d-tiles/.
6. https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:dir:2607d3af311abef046958fca57ad2f2f4d929a02;origin =https://github.com/VCityTeam/py3dtiles/.
7. https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:cnt:189a8695b5e3ea8438499206f88a83e74543ddcd;origin =https://github.com/VCityTeam/py3dtiles/.
8. https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:rev:14b1e3960962dbb9732d13ec64e583192b452242;origin =https://github.com/VCityTeam/3DUSE/.
9. https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:rev:e915ff94f9902fa0def310e159beb3caf461ab59;origin =https://github.com/jailln/UDV/.
10. http://www.itowns-project.org/.
11. https://cesiumjs.org/.
12. https://data.grandlyon.com/.
13. https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:cnt:489e2b47720e77dc80b5edad89ab175dba30f6ef;origin =https://github.com/VCityTeam/py3dtiles/.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Vincent Jaillot
Vincent Jaillot is PhD student in the University of Lyon, France and at the LIRIS laboratory. He is working on a PhD thesis entitled “3D, temporal and documented cities: formalization, visualization and navigation”. His research interests are geospatial data modelling, processing and visualization for understanding and sharing cities evolution. He is involved in the Fab-Pat project, dedicated to providing means for urban cultural heritage sharing and shaping based on numerical methods and tools. He also holds a computer science engineering degree from CPE Lyon school.
Sylvie Servigne
Dr Sylvie Servigne, since 1993, Assiciate Professor at the Computing Department of the French National Institute for Applied Sciences (INSA) and member of the reasearch Laboratory of computing for image and information systems (LIRIS – UMR CNRS 5205). Her domains of interest are information systems, and in particular spatio-temporal information systems. She is currently Director of the French National Research Group on Spatial Modelling and Geomatics at CNRS (GDR CNRS MAGIS), member of the scientific committee of the Laboratory of Excellence LABEX IMU – Intelligences des Mondes Urbains (“Intelligence of Urban Worlds”). She was until begin of 2018, Editor in Chief of the French speaking journal “International Journal of Geomatics and Spatial Analysis”. She has been associated to more than 50 scientific committees of conferences and has co-supervised 10 PhD thesis. She is co-author of around 150 scientific articles.
Gilles Gesquière
Gilles Gesquière is full professor at Lyon University, France. He is teaching in a training program dedicated to video games, called Gamagora. He is a researcher at the LIRIS, UMR CNRS 5205 Lab. He is leading the VCity research project dedicated on processing geospatial data to allow a better understanding of urban representations and urban evolutions (urban fabric). He is involved in many projects with a strong focus on the co-construction of research requiring a significant scientific plurality. Since 2016, he is leading the LabEx IMU (Laboratory of Excellence “intelligences of the Urban Worlds”), a multidisciplinary research cluster composed of 580 researchers and 37 laboratories involved in researches on the past, present and future of Urban Worlds. He is also involved in the Steering committee of the Institut Convergence EUL (research, training and Innovation in Urban studies and urban anthropocene).