Wayland, Mass., August 20, 2008 – The members of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) have adopted version 1.0.0 of the OpenGIS® CityGML Encoding Standard (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/citygml and www.citygmlwiki.org) as an official OGC Standard.
CityGML is an open data model framework and XML-based encoding standard for the storage and exchange of virtual 3D urban models. CityGML is an application schema of the OpenGIS Geography Markup Language 3 (GML3) Encoding Standard (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/gml), an international standard for spatial data exchange and encoding approved by the OGC and ISO.
"CityGML will play an important role in the creation of Virtual Cities to improve interoperability among the information systems used in many domains of activity that involve design, construction, ownership and operation of infrastructure," explained Carsten Rönsdorf, Principal Data Consultant, Ordnance Survey, United Kingdom, and chair of the CityGML specification working group at the OGC. "Activities that would benefit from the ability to share urban models using CityGML include city planning, architectural design, environmental simulation, disaster management, facilities management, vehicle and pedestrian navigation and others."
CityGML provides schemas for topographic objects in 3D city and landscape models with respect to their geometry, topology, appearance, and semantics. CityGML represents buildings (including interiors), digital terrain models, water bodies, vegetation, transportation, and city furniture objects in five levels of detail and allows connections to data held in cadastres and Building Information Models (BIM). Observable properties of feature surfaces such as infrared radiation and noise emission can also be exchanged.
This important new standard was originally defined and submitted to the OGC by the Special Interest Group 3D (SIG 3D) (http://www.ikg.uni-bonn.de/sig3d) of the Geodata Infrastructure North-Rhine Westphalia (GDI NRW) initiative in Germany.
The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 365 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OpenGIS® Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.
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