Abstract
Abstract. As web applications become more popular, 3D city models would greatly benefit from a proper web-based solution to visualise and manage them. CityJSON was introduced as a JSON encoding of the CityGML data model and promises, among several benefits, the ability to be integrated with modern web technologies. In order to provide an implementation of a web application for CityJSON data, that can be used as a reference for other applications, we developed ninja. It is a web application that allows the user to easily load and investigate a CityJSON model through a web browser. In addition, it offers support for a complex feature of CityJSON: the experimental versioning mechanism. In this paper, we describe the motivation, requirements, technical aspects and achieved functionality of ninja. We believe that such a web application can facilitate the adoption of 3D city models by more practitioners and decision makers.
Highlights
As web applications become increasingly popular, 3D city models’ usage would greatly benefit from the existence of such applications with support for 3D city model files
That is because the ability to view, investigate, and edit 3D city models through a web browser, without the need to first convert them to other formats or to use specialised tools, could greatly simplify their usage for domain experts and decision makers
We have developed ninja with the intention to provide a reference implementation for a web application using the CityJSON file format
Summary
As web applications become increasingly popular, 3D city models’ usage would greatly benefit from the existence of such applications with support for 3D city model files. In order to solve this issue, CityJSON1 was introduced as a JSON encoding for the CityGML data model (Ledoux et al, 2019). It focuses on maintaining the majority of features of CityGML through a simpler file structure that can be easier mapped to modern programming languages’ data structures. One of the main reasons for implementing a JSON encoding was the fact that it is considered today the most used information exchange mechanism for web applications. We developed ninja as a reference implementation of a web application that can handle CityJSON files. We set the following requirements regarding the application’s functionality: 1)
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