IMPLEMENTATION OF A 3D GIS IN INTERNET ENVIRONMENT

With a growing availability of spatial data, a lot of detailed 3D city models are now accessible over Internet. Such models can include realistic 3D visualization, provide thematic information about city objects, supply users with some tools for data manipulation, i.e. routing, address search, etc. These models are more and more easy to access and manipulate due to the huge technological progress in terms of data storage, rendering and querying. However, there is no 3D GIS (Geographic Information System) analysis task available over Internet. Thus, the application of the 3rd dimension in Internet-based GIS, with rare exceptions, is restricted and limited to research work. With this intention, this work proposes a deployment of a 3D GIS platform over Internet allowing a dynamic creation of datasets through a set of superposed spatial layers. The creation of each layer is based on a query on spatial database and expresses how a common user needs to organize his datasets. The 3D GIS proposes, furthermore, a set of tools to carry out some topological and attribute queries on each layer. To facilitate data interrogation, such queries can be performed graphically through a set of graphical tools. The 3D GIS is implemented through a Java applet which allows 3D spatial data selection, query and presentation on a Web browser