Web 3D GIS Application for Flood Simulation and Querying Through Open Source Technology

Abstract

Due to demand perspective, online 3D visualization and analysis of geospatial data using web 3D service (W3DS) has become an emerging research area in the geographic information system (GIS) domain. The applications of Web 3D GIS address the issues related to disaster management, city planning, transportation system, flood simulation etc. CityGML is a recently developed open geospatial consortium (OGC) standard. It can be used to outline, store and exchange virtual 3D city common information models. A plethora of open source and commercial softwares have been developed for visualization and processing of CityGML data, but its visualization and analysis in the web browser environment is still a challenging field. Although many application programming interfaces (APIs) have been customized for visualization of 3D graphics on the web, but these required specific web browsers with additional plug-ins or components. To overcome the above said limitations, Web 3D open source technologies such as WebGL, X3D, jQuery and X3DOM have been used in the developed application for flood simulation and querying on the modern web browsers. The developed application has been utilized freely available CityGML of the small region in Germany for the testing and evaluation of flood simulation and querying in a multiuser access environment. As a result, W3DS has been introduced in the application for accessing 3D dataset in an interoperable framework.