A metadata ADE for CityGML

Abstract

While there exist international standards for geospatial metadata (ISO 19115), these are rarely used in practice for 3D datasets, and one of the OGC standards for 3D city models, CityGML, does not offer a mechanism to store metadata in a structured way. Having metadata in CityGML files, which are in practice often very large and complex, would provide us with the ability to quickly understand the nature of a dataset and to determine if it is relevant for a specific task. A lack of metadata introduces uncertainty into models that are already full of assumptions and estimations. In this paper, we first examine the metadata needs that are specific for 3D geographical datasets and propose ISO 19115 compliant categories. We then describe how these can be used within CityGML by defining an Application Domain Extension (ADE), which allows us to store metadata for existing city objects of CityGML, as well as objects in other domain-specific ADEs. Our ADE, its schema in both UML and XSD, and sample datasets is openly accessible, and it can be easily extended to support application specific metadata. In addition the metadata elements have been added to the core of CityJSON. We also offer software to generate automatically many of the metadata categories and we propose coupling it with the source 3D dataset.

CityJSON: a compact and easy-to-use encoding of the CityGML data model

“…CityGML has very limited support for metadata [Labetski et al, 2018]. Only a few elements are supported, such as the bounding box and the CRS, and most elements are on the city model level and not on the module or city feature level.…”

A Harmonized Data Model for Noise Simulation in the EU

“…These attributes are ISO 19115 compliant and based on the CityGML Metadata ADE developed by Reference [37].…”

Geospatial openness: from software to standards & data

“…In the second paper focused on the same domain of 3D GIS, Labetski et al [21] propose a metadata ADE for CityGML. While the concept of metadata does not sound thrilling to most, it is a crucial sidekick to discover and access any type of data, including 3D city models.…”