A continuous deployment-based approach for the collaborative creation, maintenance, testing and deployment of CityGML models

Abstract

Georeferenced 3D models are an increasingly common choice to store and display urban data in many application areas. CityGML is an open and standardized data model, and exchange format that provides common semantics for 3D city entities and their relations and one of the most common options for this kind of information. Currently, creating and maintaining CityGML models is costly and difficult. This is in part because both the creation of the geometries and the semantic annotation can be complex processes that require at least some manual work. In fact, many publicly available CityGML models have errors. This paper proposes a method to facilitate the regular maintenance of correct city models in CityGML. This method is based on the continuous deployment strategy and tools used in software development, but adapted to the problem of creating, maintaining and deploying CityGML models, even when several people are working on them at the same time. The method requires designing and implementing CityGML deployment pipelines. These pipelines are automatic implementations of the process of building, testing and deploying CityGML models. These pipelines must be run by the maintainers of the models when they make changes that are intended to be shared with others. The pipelines execute increasingly complex automatic tests in order to detect errors as soon as possible, and can even automate the deployment step, where the CityGML models are made available to their end users. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of this method, and as an example of its application, a CityGML deployment pipeline has been developed for an example scenario where three actors maintain the same city model. This scenario is representative of the kind of problems that this method intends to solve, and it is based on real work in progress. The main benefits of this method are the automation of model testing, every change to the model is tested in a repeatable way; the automation of the model deployment, every change to the model can reach its end users as fast as possible; the systematic approach to integrating changes made by different people working together on the models, including the possibility of keeping parallel versions with a common core; an automatic record of every change made to the models (who did what and when) and the possibility of undoing some of those changes at any time. ARTICLE HISTORY

Infrastructure for 3D Modeling of Historical Fountains in Istanbul with GIS-Based Procedural Approach

“…In order to verify the great potential of 3D city models, high-quality building models must be produced at an affordable cost. An effective solution to the automation problem must be found first, as buildings are the most essential components of 3D city models and probably the most expensive to produce [3,4,21,22]. Three-dimensional city model production is one of the most popular research areas today; however, there are still difficulties in accurately modeling and visualizing urban areas with dense buildings.…”

“…Moreover, high-detail models cannot be used directly in many applications because the data sets are too large. No matter how detailed that models are produced with new technological methods, these models must be generalized, diluted, and edited manually to be used effectively [3,22,27,28]. Although these can be met to a certain level with developing technology and the many new applications that have been developed for this purpose, the 3D modeling of large-scale urban environments in the computer environment is still considered to be a challenging problem.…”

Construction of spatial information model of 3D real estate: case study of the Nanjing gulou central business district

“…However, the 3D cadastral modeling methods mainly face on the dispute between the situation demand and the cost-benefit. Relevant scholars have paid attention to the issues of modeling cost (Griffith-Charles and Sutherland 2013, Kalantari et al 2015, or to keep the transition smoother and economically feasible (Shojaei 2014, Prieto et al 2018, Višnjevac et al 2018. But it is also worth pointing out that the current research results to reduce the cost of 3D cadastral modeling have not been applied in the regions with complex 3D property rights spatial relations for practical application.…”

A Semantics-Based Approach for Simplifying IFC Building Models to Facilitate the Use of BIM Models in GIS

“…The traditional source of building models for GIS is surveying [1], where airborne photogrammetry and laser scanning are used to capture city information, from which virtual city models can be created [2]. However, these data collection methods can only be applied to existing buildings [3], and it is costly and time-consuming to create city models in such a way, due to the need for manual processing of geometry and semantics of models [4][5][6].…”