Bing-Shiuan Tsai
Extending the 3D City Database 5.0 to support CityGML application in QGIS
Semantic 3D city models data management can be achieved in CityGML with database encoding to handle large amounts of data.
For CityGML, there is an open source database encoding called the 3DCityDB. The version in use is 4.X, which is derived from the CityGML v.2.0. Except for data storage, it enables users to convert object associations to relations between predefined feature tables based on a mapping rules set consistent to the standard.
Although the 3DCityDB was developed to simplify CityGML complexity, it still remains complex for users with basic SQL skills. However, a plugin for QGIS, called “3DCityDB-Tools for QGIS”, is developed to facilitate the interaction with the 3DCityDB for a wider group of practitioners, narrowing the gap between them and the geodata experts via a GUI in QGIS.
The OGC has recently published the CityGML v.3.0 in Sep. 2021, and the 3DCityDB is being updated to version 5.0 in order to add full support for CityGML v.3.0. The goal of this research is to investigate how the new database structure of the 3DCityDB v.5.0 can be coupled with the existing 3DCityDB-Tools plugin, in order to enable support not only for the existing version 4.x, but also for the upcoming version 5.0. The research will start from familiarising the mapping structure of the data in both CityGML v.2.0 and v.3.0 to the new schema, performing experiments on the database modification on the server-side, and eventually improving the user experience with the existing QGIS plugin.
Supervisors: Giorgio Agugiaro and Camilo León-Sánchez
(company involved: Claus Nagel, Zhihang Yao)