EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES FOR THE DEFINITION OF 3D GEOSPATIAL WEB SERVICES

The importance of geospatial information delivery, across Internet, is increasing more and more. But if in the last years was satisfying to get 2D geographic information, from Internet browsers, extracted by http servers supported by map servers, today users would acquire 3D information especially in some case or sectors as that of building cadastral applications or civil protection. In this case availability of 3D information could be very valuable. But behind this need there exist many important aspects that today are only partially resolved as the definition of 3D geospatial web services that are connected and are dependent on some other aspects (i.e. the standardization of 3D geographic data models). The experimentation carried out deals with these issues, trying to define a 3D web service in order to visualize and query by Internt Browser 3D model of the built environment. Actually there are few 3D data models (such as CityGML) whose standard definition process is not complete. Besides these models are built with main requirement of 3D visualization even if at different level of detail. But some sectors require a better use of geographic 3D information such as querying at different level of detail (such as at a level regarding the different building parts defined through their attributes) and 3D processing. Based on a project named "Interoperability and cooperative management of geographic, dynamic, multidimensional and distributed data with Free and Open Source GIS: Management and use of distributed 3D data by open source Web-GIS software" funded by Italian Ministry of Instruction, University and Research as Program of Relevant National Interest (PRIN 2007), it is here illustrated a part of a process, that start from the construction of a Java plugin that initially consist in reading information directly from a relational database management server with spatial extension, and ends with the construction of an application server which is based the extraction of GML 3D data, all based on the existence of a 3D geospatial web service whose definition is one the last and main goal of the research.