3D Topological modeling and visualisation for 3D GIS

Beyond Virtual Reality, 3D Geographical Information Systems should provide efficient spatial analysis tools able to use all capabilities of the third dimension, and a visualization that could operate on the results of queries. To address these issues, this paper presents a fully 3D topological model that was implemented in an object-oriented database management system. That prototype uses a 1 : 5,000 scale database where the problems of abstraction and symbolisation arise, and allows a set of semantic, geometrical and topological queries. The results can be visualized after several transformations on some objects of the database to make them more significant. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.