Galdos Systems has a long history of working with geographic data and data modeling. As an original creator of GML and an active participant in open standards development, Galdos also has a deep understanding of standards such as CityGML.
As an open standard, CityGML promotes interoperability, providing a consistent encoding for the data shared between architects, city planners, and construction crews. The information necessary to build an accurate three-dimensional model of a city needs to be captured and processed automatically, checked for quality, and distributed from the people who produce it to the people who use it. Automated information exchange makes it possible to apply quality assurance mechanisms to check data integrity and even data semantics. This can reduce data errors resulting in lower costs, and even helping to save people’s lives.
What are Intelligent City Models
An Intelligent City Model is more than just a three-dimensional representation of a city. Semantic details in the CityGML data give it meaning that can be leveraged with the right visualization tools. Having semantic content means that there is understanding of things being part of other things and contained inside them – like walls being part of a building, and furniture being inside a room.
To deal effectively with problems such as lighting, energy use, pollution, noise, and crime require an understanding of the city in three dimensions, and at different scales and levels of detail. Visualizing a model of a city and using it to calculate light, shade, and reflected heat patterns, allows these things to be considered before a building is constructed, rather than finding out their impact after it is built. Plotting incidents on a model of the city allows law enforcement to better analyse and study patterns of crimes and initiate more effective crime prevention measures.
3D City Models
Galdos provides tools for managing databases of 3D city models, as well as tools for visualizing the models and adding layers of imagery and metadata.
Digital information is exponentially increasing in volume, with digital outputs rapidly replacing paper outputs in many areas such as maps and building plans. Leveraging this digital information to create digital models of a city addresses the issue of improving urban planning and urban infrastructure development without requiring changes to the processes and technologies already starting to be used.
Projects such as the Riyadh Base Map provide the first steps toward creating a complete 3D model that can be used for city planning and urban development management. Detailed drawings that are used for permit processing can also be used to help build detailed, usable, three-dimensional models of the city itself, providing an information infrastructure that can support a broad spectrum of applications.
The City of Berlin currently has one of the most complete city models, and extensive work is being done with CityGML data in the Netherlands. The City of Vancouver’s Open Data Catalogue is an initiative that is making data and images about the city freely available. The Catalogue contains many different types of data, and also provides web feeds which allow users to subscribe to frequently updated content.
Visualization
Galdos has built proprietary online web map solutions and customized animated 3D maps using various technologies such as Flash and JavaScript, and the Google Earth and Google Maps APIs.
Galdos created the IN3d™ Visualization Engine for developing applications that work with three-dimensional data such as CityGML. IN3d provides a platform for building client applications where 2D imagery is fused with a 3D model to create a virtual environment.
IN3d supports visualization of 3D models of cities by fusing two-dimensional data, such as images, with three-dimensional data, such as CityGML, to create an information-rich digital environment that is a navigable representation of a city. Virtual environments can be used for a wide variety of purposes such as building planning and infrastructure management.
It is easy to add value by layering additional information such as dynamic business and services directories on top of a virtual city model. The INdicio™ Web Registry provides storage and management capabilities for multiple layers of data, as well as indexing and searching capabilities.
Galdos designed the GML INspector™ to visualize GML and CityGML data sets. Because these data sets can be very large, GML INspector parses the files according to the preferences of a user, and visualizes only the geometries that the user specifies. This allows the GML INspector to have a very small footprint, and allows the user to focus on just the parts of the model that they are most interested in. Additional data can be incrementally added to what is being visualized, and the user can zoom in to the model to see more levels of detail and objects that are nested inside other objects, which would otherwise be obscured.
