OGC Requests Comments on CityGML Encoding Standard

The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (MA, USA) is requesting public comment on the candidate CityGML Encoding Standard. CityGML is a Geography Markup Language 3 (GML3) application schema for the storage and exchange of virtual 3D city models.

CityGML is a common information model for the representation of 3D urban objects. It defines the classes and relations for the most relevant topographic objects in cities and regional models with respect to their geometrical, topological, semantical and appearance properties. Included are generalisation hierarchies between thematic classes, aggregations, relations between objects, and spatial properties. This thematic information goes beyond graphic exchange formats and allows users to employ virtual 3D city models for sophisticated analysis tasks in different application domains such as simulations, urban data mining, facility management, and thematic inquiries.

Activities that would benefit from the richness of CityGML data include city planning, real estate, insurance, architectural design, environmental simulation, mobile telecommunication, disaster management, homeland security, facilities management, vehicle and pedestrian navigation, training simulators and others. CityGML will play an important role in the use of Building Information Models (BIM) to improve interoperability among the information systems used in the many domains of activity that involve design, construction, ownership and operation of buildings and capital projects.

The RFC can be downloaded from the URL below. Comments are due by 20^th March 2008.