Web 3D Service: an open source implementation

Abstract

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) represents some of the most interesting challenges for software engineering of our time. The data volume, the complexity and the critical use cases demands expertise in di erent computer science domains, besides the knowledge of some geography principles. The development of standards related to geographic information representation and its manipulation, either de facto or de jure standards is crucial to the development of large scale GIS applications. By default georeferenced data have been represented in a two dimensional plane for simplicity. Nowadays the evolution of graphics hardware and the emergence of technologies like WebGL give us the necessary support to make 3D GIS possible. But newer and more sophisticated GPUs are not enough to support mature 3D applications. Standards related to 3D representation and manipulation are necessary. In this work we analyze the Open Geospatial Consortium Web 3D Service draft speci cation and provide an open source implementation for it.