Introduction

Semantic 3D city models are experiencing a veritable boom and often are the foundation for a wide range of analysis and simulations. These models allow the accurate representation of landscapes as well as urban areas and are therefore interesting for a variety of applications. Until now the focus has mostly been on models of buildings. Firstly because of their dominant role within the cityscape and secondly because of the lack of information and data sources for other thematic areas such as street space. This however has changed in recent years. A rising number of cities and communities provide information about streets by single line representations. In some cases, even areal data on the exact shape of street space objects is available. This development is fairly new, therefore there are very few guidelines on detailed areal representations of roads and street space within city models, let alone actual implementations. Most existing standards focus on a linear or parametric representation of roads. This leads to some problems if a detailed and highly accurate areal model of street space is required. Continuing a study project conducted by the Chair of Geoinformatics of the Technical University of Munich (see Kolbe et al. 2015), this work explores the possibility for a detailed generation of street space objects within semantic 3D city models based on open data and compliant to the CityGML standard. The aim of this project is to illustrate how potential applications would benefit from accurate street space models. Subsequently a representation concept of such a model based on modelling requirements is developed and selected parts of this concept are implemented within a semantic 3D model of New York City.

This Wiki page gives a detailed documentation on the whole project. To navigate through this Wiki check the hierarchy on the left or the table of contents below.