3D City Database - the new dimension of city modelling

The 3D city database project provides free software to store, represent and manage virtual 3D city models on top of a standard spatial relational database. The database contains semantically rich, hierarchically structured, multi-scale urban objects, provides history and version management, digital terrain models, and georeferenced aerial images. Thus this model is suitable for performing complex GIS modeling and analysis tasks for 3D City Models in an efficient way, involving semantics and spatial aspects, far beyond visualization.

Two different versions of the 3D City Database are provided, each based on a matured standard spatial (object-)relational database: Oracle 10g Spatial or PostgreSQL. The latter is free software under the GNU General Public License. Regarding functionality, both versions are similar; however, the PostGIS/Postgres version lacks some features like version and history management, or the management of georeferenced images.

The schema of the 3D City Database is based on CityGML, a language for representing and exchanging virtual 3D city models. CityGML is being developed by the Special Interest Group 3D (SIG 3) of the Spatial Data Infrastructure initiative North Rhine Westphalia (GDI NRW) in Germany and is being standardized in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Currently, the CityGML specification is a discussion paper which is assumed to become a Best Practices Paper in July 2007. Technically, CityGML is an application of the Geography Markup Language (GML), an OGC standard for representing geospatial features. See the CityGML Homepage www.citygml.org or the CityGML-Specification for further details.

The software presented on this site was developed by the Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformation of the University of Bonn, Germany (referred to as ?Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation? until October 2006), in cooperation with the lat/lon GmbH on behalf of the Senate of Berlin (Berliner Senatsverwaltung) and the Berlin Partner GmbH. As an EFRE project, it war funded by the European Union. In a follow-up project funded by the City of Bonn, the scripts were adapted from Oracle to PostgreSQL.

The software provided on this site includes

- SQL scripts to generate the database schema for 3D City Models (Oracle and PostgreSQL)

- tools to import ESRI-Shapefiles and raster data (Oracle only) into the database

- tools to manage history and planning versions (Oracle only)

The 3D city database project is ongoing work. It will continuously be improved and completed by new features and object classes.

A new version of the 3D city database has been developed by the Institute for Geodesy and Geoinformation Science (IGG) of Berlin University of Technology. More details including free software and a comprehensive documentation can be obtained from the following web page: www.igg.tu-berlin.de/software