Abstract
Abstract. Floods pose a risk that is likely to worsen in the future due to climate change. Therefore, it is essential that decision makers and domain experts have the tools to evaluate the effects of floods. We developed a tool that visualizes the earth and buildings in three dimensions to simulate floods so that effective strategies can be developed to enhance resilience and mitigate the effects of floods. We opted to use open standards and free and open source software (FOSS) for Web to maximize interoperability, replicability, reusability, and accessibility. As a result of the literature review, we decided to use CityGML and CesiumJS for three-dimensional geospatial data visualization. However, as CityGML data is not available for the cities that our project focuses on, we developed software called shp2city that converts Esri shapefile to CityGML data in LOD1 or LOD2. Moreover, as CityGML data cannot be immediately used with CesiumJS, we used 3DCityDB to store, represent, and manage the CityGML data; 3DCityDB Importer/Exporter to export the CityGML data in KML/COLLADA/glTF format to be used within the 3DCityDB Web-Map-Client that is based on CesiumJS for visualization. Finally, we simulated floods to aid in the informed decision-making process regarding adaptation measures and mitigation of flooding effects.
Highlights
Climate change has already affected the rainfall rates and ocean levels, and the situation is likely to exacerbate (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2014)
There is a number of open standards that exist for three-dimensional (3D) geographic data visualization on Web, among which the most prominent ones are VRML, X3D, KML/COLLADA, glTF, binary glTF, B3DM, CityGML, and CityJSON (Zlatanova et al, 2012, Schilling et al, 2016)
CesiumJS has been used for visualization and analysis of CityGML data of Potsdam converted to KML/COLLADA format using 3D City Database (3DCityDB) Importer/Exporter (Yao et al, 2018, Chaturvedi, 2014)
Summary
Climate change has already affected the rainfall rates and ocean levels, and the situation is likely to exacerbate (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2014). CesiumJS has been used for visualization and analysis of CityGML data of Potsdam converted to KML/COLLADA format using 3D City Database (3DCityDB) Importer/Exporter (Yao et al, 2018, Chaturvedi, 2014). One of the use cases within this project is 3D visualization and query of city models, in particular, buildings for flood simulation. As CityGML has become the most widely used open standard for the representation and exchange of 3D city models and CesiumJS surpasses the other open source libraries that are capable of reading 3D geographic data formats, we opted for 3DCityDB for visualization and query of buildings.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
