Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
for any future use. In the future all these data will be part of a virtual 3D model,
which will increase in size continuously pari passu with new projects and appear-
ing development sites. So apart from the perhaps obvious circle shaped dia-
gram, which indicates the reuse and maintenance of data in general, this figure
also shows a new phase that lies close to the maintenance and is called interface.
Interface implies an interaction, which has not yet been part of such construction
data but is possible, when these data are transformed to GMO's. As a GMO fea-
ture data can be included in a monitoring situation connecting the virtual model
to a real construction site whether it's a building, a bridge, a road or any other
construction. Sensor data are easily monitored this way, and in principle only one
model is necessary to cover large areas. Figure
1
might not be entirely correct any-
more since the data acquisition phase in a computer environment is more or less
included in all phases, although the main data still are acquired in the beginning of
a project.
GMO's can be used widely for many different purposes, when it comes to
representing real features in a virtual model. In the InfraWorld project we had
to decide what kind of functionality of GMO's we wanted to show within the
time frame given. During the preliminary discussions of the project, which had a
duration of almost the whole first project year, it got clear that a GMO approach
would mean a completely new paradigm and data model not used within geospa-
tial data anywhere else, but it also gave us the opportunity to create an interac-
tive city model, and test a platform that can handle sensors in a city environment
in a cross disciplinary and in a generic way, which opens the possibility for an
open co-operation and reuse of the platform development. Therefore the test sce-
narios chosen in the project had a broader perspective towards sensor city and the
handling of dynamic real time data, and were aiming at a platform development
rather than an application limited for infrastructure data. The test scenarios are
presented here in short:
1.
Cross platform interaction and platform independency
One of the strongest arguments for using GMO's is not only the independency of
using different platforms, but also the possibility of fusing different technologi-
cal solutions together into one coherent platform. In InfraWorld the development
comprised an interaction directed from three different existing clients. One based
on gvSIG (
http://www.gvsig.org/
) a 2D GIS system, which ran on Linux pro-
vided by Iver, a company based in Valencia, Spain. A second client was based on
Virtual Map (
http://www.vianovasystems.com/
)
a 3D model viewer running on
Microsoft Windows provided by Vianova in Finland, and finally Virtual Globe
(
http://www.virtual-globe.info/
) a 3D globe viewer, which also is running using
Java Virtual Machine, in this case on Apple OSX and provided by Norkart in
Norway.
One thing is that these three different clients were loading the same model, but
they did also access the same feature database the model was based on. That way
an alteration of the model in one client triggered the same alteration in the other
