Interoperable Visualization of 3d City Models Using Ogc’s Standard 3d Portrayal Service

Abstract. The demand of serving large 3D spatial data, mainly of urban areas, reflects the need of hierarchical data structures for 3D data. During the last years the OGC community standard I3S (Indexed 3d Scene Layer, ESRI) and 3D Tiles (Analytical Graphics, Inc.) emerged in order to deal with this challenge. Conceptually, hierarchical structures for 3D data operate similarly to web map tiles, differing only in the implementation. Although 3D hierarchical formats can transmit arbitrary sized geospatial data, they are not interoperable with consuming/visualization technologies on the client. A series of prototype implementations focus on rendering of hierarchical organized massive 3D data in various web client technologies employing the 3D Portrayal Service. As a result, the user can query a scene via the 3D Portrayal Service by specifying a spatial region, rather than a specific resource via a URI. The result is delivered either using I3S or 3D Tiles as a data delivery format, depending on which data is available for the specified region. The client APIs are capable of rendering either the I3S or the 3D Tiles content.