UD‐SV: Urban data services and visualization framework for sharing multidisciplinary research

Abstract

With the widespread availability of a large volume of urban data, stakeholders from different domains require advanced tools to manage, visualize and understand cities and their evolution. During the last few years, researchers have proposed numerous research works and applications to illustrate the cities of the past and possible scenarios of the future under different conditions. However, many of these approaches are one‐time solutions and not based on standards, making them obsolete and unusable for reproducible research. In this article, we present UD‐SV: an Urban data‐Services and Visualization open‐source framework for multidisciplinary research to handle complex processing, analysis, and visualization of urban data. However, our goal is not to present a one‐time monolithic software solution for urban data management and analysis, but we demonstrate the design and development of an open and interoperable software framework driven by use cases from diverse users to solve applied research challenges. The main contribution of UD‐SV is that it uses open standards and open data with documented and reproducible processes with a particular emphasis on the reuse of existing open‐source software components. We also show an enhanced use of standards to enable a shift toward components that are interchangeable or composable with other existing components in the GIS community.

IMUV: A Digital Twin for Mediation to Discover and Exchange on Territories

“…The frontend is developed using open-source components like three.js 7 ITowns 8 and UD-Viz, the 3D visualization component of UD-SV (Samuel et al, 2023, Weil et al, 2023. three.js provides features like collision detection, animation, and handling media assets (like images, audio, videos, etc.).…”

“…This field utilizes various standards such as 3DTiles, CityGML, PLY (Polygon File Format), X3D, COLLADA, and WebGL for representing city objects or objects of cultural significance. We-bGL frameworks like X3DOM, three.js, Cesium, and iTowns play pivotal roles in visualizing 3D objects in urban digital twins (Samuel et al, 2023). 3D models of cities can be further extended to a full-fledged urban digital twins, integrating data streams and sensor data by using extensions of city information models (e.g., CityGML) like Dyanmizers (Chaturvedi and Kolbe, 2015) or versioning (Chaturvedi et al, 2017, Samuel et al, 2020 that can represent concurrent views of urban evolution.…”