The dissection of three-dimensional geographic information systems

In this paper we dissected the 3-dimensional Geographic Information Systems (3D GISs) and disambiguated some points such as (1) 3D GIS should be a component of GIS, it's a subsystem; (2) data modelling is not the main obstacle to its development; (3) it's no necessary and also very difficult for 3D GIS to replace GIS; (4) the main developing direction of 3D GIS should be special subsystems, that is, 3D GIS research must be based on relative application areas. ? Springer-Verlag 2002.EI