Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Data Storage and Interactivity of the 3D Model
Making models of historical buildings is important and integral part of modern 3D
cartography nowadays. We can find models of specific historical object (Angelini
et al.
2011
; Popelka and Brychtov´
2012
), of large complexes (Yan and Limin
2011
), models of objects still in existence (Hanzalov´ et al.
2011
) or vanished
buildings (He
2011
). 3D models are created in miscellaneous levels of detail or
interactivity. The very important point of modelling is defining the purpose of
a model. The purpose of the model determines the approach of creation. We can
mention lot of model purposes e.g. for presentation, for virtual reconstruction, as
objects of large information system and more other examples. More details can be
found in Belai and Jedli
ˇ
ka (
2012
).
There it is possible to distinguish two different purposes of building models
created during this particular project: for virtual reconstruction and elements of an
information-rich system. 3D models of buildings work here as a front-end of the
information system that manage links to historical data about buildings and about
important personages and events connected to buildings.
The core of the information system is a central data storage that stores all
collected information. This data storage is the source for data presentation in
other parts of the system. According to the agreement of project partners the
Plone Content Management System solution has been chosen. In general, a CMS
is a web content publishing and management system that allows users to create,
submit, and publish their content directly within a web site without any develop-
ment tools or knowledge of HTML (see Plone
2013
). This approach allows
separation of geometric data creation from attribute data creation. Both types of
the data are linked in CMS according to the unique building identifiers used by
Germans during the 2nd WW in Terez´n ghetto. This unique building identifier
consists of building block identifier (capital Latin letter and Roman number—see
Fig.
2a
) and rectangular street nomenclature (vertical Qs, horizontal Ls—see
Fig.
2b
) with house orientation number. There is an example in Fig.
2c
, showing
block DIII and two particular buildings: DIIIL307 (upper bordered building) and
DIIIQ408 (bordered on the left side). 3D models are finally visualized in Google
Earth plug-in that has been chosen after a discussion within the project partners.
The CMS stores different information types in separate folders like Pictures,
Places where KML files and buildings descriptions are stored, Persons where
information about important personages are stored, and Tours are for predefined
tour through the model of city. The structure of sub-folders for storing models is
created according to the unique building identifiers from 2nd WW. Each building
folder contains two objects. The first object is a KML file with geometry of
a building and the second object is structured text file for the description data
related to the building.
Important part of created models is the interactivity that allows discovering the
information about individual buildings by clicking on them during visualization.
There is a need to create KML files with “clickable” models that allows showing all
