Val3dity: validation of 3D GIS primitives according to the international standards

Hugo Ledoux

doi:10.1186/s40965-018-0043-x

Hugo Ledoux

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s40965-018-0043-x

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Abstract

The validity of 3D primitives in 3D GIS datasets is often a prerequisite for using them in simulation and decision-making software, e.g. visibility analysis, noise pollution assessment, and energy estimation. However, while agreed definitions exist (in the international standard ISO19107), most software vendors ignore them and implement simpler 3D primitives, for instance by excluding interior boundaries in surfaces and/or solid. Such limitations prevent practitioners from exchanging and converting datasets, and thus to use these in other software and applications.I present in this paper val3dity, an open-source software to validate 3D primitives according to the international definitions of ISO19107. Practitioners can use it directly, without limitations: its code is freely available under the GPLv3 license, both binaries and a web-application are publicly available. It takes as input several formats (including the international standard CityGML), and outputs a report that helps users identify and understand the errors.I describe some of the engineering decisions supporting val3dity, and show that it can be used to validate real-world datasets.

Highlights

Three-dimensional GIS datasets, containing volumes and surfaces embedded in 3D, are being increasingly used as input in different applications, see Biljecki et al [4] for an overview
Volumes are often represented with the Definitions of 3D primitives in val3dity While the ISO19107 primitives do not need to be linear or planar, i.e. curves defined by mathematical functions are allowed, for val3dity, as in CityGML and most 3D GIS packages in use, the following two restrictions are used:
It should be noticed that val3dity does not validate the schema of the input, the main reason is that often small errors are not an issue for the validation and val3dity can recover from them;

Summary

Introduction

Three-dimensional GIS datasets, containing volumes and surfaces embedded in 3D, are being increasingly used as input in different applications, see Biljecki et al [4] for an overview. Val3dity fully supports interior boundaries for both surfaces and for solids, and the interactions between different solids can be validated.

Results

Conclusion