Studying and planning urban evolution is essential to 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 article, we go further by integrating the temporal dimension of cities to geospatial web delivery standard formats. In doing so, we enable interactive visualization of large-scale timeevolving 3D city models on the web. A key characteristic of this article 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 to this generic conceptual model. After that, we specify the conceptual model into 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 give access to reproducibility notes allowing researchers to replicate all the experiments.

Many geographic features such as 3D city models, real‐time sensor data and multimedia documents (photo, audio, video, etc.) are nowadays available for describing urban areas. These heterogeneous geographic features are multidimensional (spatial, thematic and temporal), can have multiple representations (text, iconography, etc.) and can be modeled using diverse formats. Browsing and crossing these features can help us to analyze and understand the past and present and plan the future evolution of cities. Furthermore, doing so in a web context allows us to share and enrich them in a collective way. In this article we propose a new generic model (GenLinkable) for integrating such features. We also propose the Gen4DCity‐Doc model which specifies GenLinkable to integrate multimedia documents and time‐evolving 3D city models for web visualization and navigation. Gen4DCity‐Doc extends previous research results by integrating new resources describing cities (multimedia documents). Gen4DCity‐Doc is implemented in a web prototype based on a four‐tier architecture using and enhancing open source software and standards. Finally, we also demonstrate that these models open up new navigation possibilities in 3D city models and in multimedia documents through a 3D web interface, which is a current challenge, especially to help researchers in urban history.