THREE-DIMENSIONAL APPROACHES FOR MODELLING BUILDINGS, CITIES AND LANDSCAPES

This paper presents an overview of the development and possibilities of open source approaches for the modelling of 3D objects, buildings, urban and rural environments. Besides the short overview of some specific CAD approaches, this paper focuses on the three open-source solutions and transfer formats that are based on the XML meta-language for data marking: KML, X3D and CityGML. The characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of all the solutions based on the XML are outlined; difficulties and obstacles that still may hinder their future development are also given. The features and applications of the most promising CityGML approach are described in more detail, which, besides the 3D visualization and spatial data transfer role, offers implementation of class aggregation hierarchies, and the addition of semantic and thematic properties of objects. The concluding remarks specify the main existent and potential application domains for virtual 3D models of reality, also in the field of surveying.