Rethinking GIS Towards The Vision Of Smart Cities Through CityGML

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Smart cities present a substantial growth opportunity in the coming years. The role of GIS in the smart city ecosystem is to integrate different data acquired by sensors in real time and provide better decisions, more efficiency and improved collaboration. Semantically enriched vision of GIS will help evolve smart cities into tomorrow's much smarter cities since geospatial/location data and applications may be recognized as a key ingredient of smart city vision. However, it is need for the Geospatial Information communities to debate on "Is 3D Web and mobile GIS technology ready for smart cities?" This research places an emphasis on the challenges of virtual 3D city models on the road to smarter cities. MOTIVATIONIn many countries, addition to people chose to live in big cities, an increasing number of people from small towns and villages is moving into big cities. Globally more people live in urban areas than in rural areas. Production, processing, query, analysis, visualization, updating, maintaining and sharing of three dimensional (3D) geospatial data related to cities are very important tasks for managing the urban environments in 3D while the world continues population growth and urbanization.The possibility to visualize and interact with 3D city models on the Web is of interest for technicians, decision makers and citizens (Rodrigues et al., 2013). The accessibility of the online city models through web browsers can enlarge the audience of the 3D model to broad audience and professionals that typically are not expert on geospatial information but who can be benefit on their work from the usage of 3D city models (Prandi et al., 2015).There is a rapidly increasing need for 3D geospatial information and 3D city models for many different areas of application like urban planning, landscape planning, environmental planning, 3D cadaster, real-estate, public participation, facility management, disaster management, transportation, energy planning, tourism, simulation, and analysis. These application areas are also central to the very notion of a smart city.Today, more and more cities worldwide are undergoing transition from 2D Geospatial Information System (GIS) to 3D Web GIS, and using Web 3D city viewers or virtual globes. Recently several European cities like Berlin, Lyon, Wien and Rotterdam, for instance, have realized their official 3D city models as Open Data by means of LOD2/LOD3 textured CityGML models of the whole city (Prandi et al., 2015, Mao et al., 2014, Gaillard et al., 2015. Industry companies like Google, Apple and Here are also integrating 3D city models into their map services (Mao et al., 2014, Prandi et al., 2015. Volunteered Geographic Data/Information (VGI) communities such as Open Street Map (OSM) are building 3D city models as well (Mao et al., 2014). From this point of view opportunities to utilize 3D urban mapping and the volume of online virtual city models are expanding dramatically and virtual 3D city applications are increasingly employed in different domains.The successful ...

An Ontology Integrating the Open Standards of City Models and Internet of Things for Smart-City Applications

“…A geospatial data set usually describes the location (i.e., geometries with 2D or 3D coordinates), attribute (i.e., textual, numerical, categorical, and ordinal characteristics), and temporal (i.e., creation time, sampling time, or valid time) information of features [7]. Geospatial features in a smart city should follow clearly defined semantic classes to express their inherited attributes, constraints, and functions [8], [9]. For instance, city features, such as buildings, roads, rooms, trees, and bodies of water, should be interpreted and analyzed differently according to their semantic meanings.…”