Integrating Urban Knowledge into 3D City Models

• Research unit: COST
• Project number: C05.0078

Key words (English)

Urban Ontology; 3D City Model; Geo-Information System; GIS; Semantic Model; Knowledge Base; User Interface

Research programs (English)

COST-Action C21 - Towntology

Short description (English)

The main objective of our project is contributing to a better communication and a greater interoperability in the urban field. With this intention, our project will consist in two main steps: - representation and integration in an urban ontology of urban data from various sources such as GIS, official plans or any other document; - 3D representation and visualization of this knowledge within 3D city models.

Partners and International Organizations (English)

BE, CH, ES, FI, FR, GR, IT, NO, RO, UK

Abstract (English)

The aim of this research is to develop theoretical and computational tools to: - integrate urban data and knowledge coming from various sources such as GIS, official plans, 3D city models, etc. - build 3D user interfaces that facilitate the understanding of complex urban projects by different categories of actors. As the creation of accurate 3D models is an expensive process we will first concentrate on the development of a prototyping tool so as to easily produce and test different models. We will use a declarative language for the knowledge representation and integration, as well as for the knowledge visualization. The formal representation of the knowledge will be in fact an urban ontology. The visualization of the non-geometric knowledge in the 3D interface will not be fixed but will depend on the choices made by the user of our tool. The approach we have chosen is 3D spatial hypertext. So the specifications of an interface will consist in specifying how to build a spatial 3D hypertext that represents adequately and efficiently (from the user point of view) the formalized non-geometric knowledge.

References in databases (English)

Swiss Database: COST-DB of the State Secretariat for Education and Research Hallwylstrasse 4 CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland Tel. [phone] Swiss Project-Number: C05.0078