Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
clients. A GMO added in one client almost immediately showed up in the other
clients if they had the same geographic area of the model loaded. By the way, no
exchange standards, or conversions were needed for that.
2.
Features handled in space and time
To show how GMO's can be handled when it comes to space and time, it was
decided to monitor moving features allowing their object representation to move
around in the virtual model according to their counterpart in real life. Such objects
could be trains, ships, busses, aeroplanes etc. But we chose taxis because there
were a lot of taxis in the test area, and the data were freely available. These data
were truly dynamic since a real time connection to a database were feeding the
city model with actual co-ordinates for each taxi, and the GMO representing a taxi
was moving accordingly to the positions received. The only difference from GMO
to GMO is an id identifying each individual taxi. Part of the GMO could be to
receive a lot more information concerning the journey, and the vehicle with driver,
and other relevant information, though these possibilities were not implemented in
this project.
3.
Collision detection
When several domains are working on the same project with each their focus on
either water, lightning, sewer etc. using different kinds of data and specialized
software, the only thing in common is the geography as long as the same coor-
dinate system is used, which unfortunately sometimes is not the case. Many sys-
tems can handle geometric collision detection but since we are using GMO's we
extended the collision detection to be rule based. This way features could collide
when for instance a minimum distance rule was not obeyed. Semantic based rules
are very difficult to handle in a generic way, why software developments in gen-
eral are struggling to implement control mechanisms that handle rules other than
geometric based.
4.
Energy monitoring system
Even though this part of the project was a bit off topic when it comes to infra-
structure data, the content is very much up to date and proofing the concept in
general using sensors in the model connected to reality. Parts of the development
came from earlier developments already mentioned. The idea here was to moni-
tor the buildings in the model with regards to their energy consumption. They got
coloured according to their consumption compared with the size of the building
and use of sustainable energy. Finally an user interaction was developed to add
solar collectors and add solar panels on to the building appearing in the model
and improving the overall energy consumption. This kind of energy monitoring
and sensor activity is very relevant, and very much on the energy provider's wish
list, because a tight monitoring of the energy consumption enables the compa-
nies to plan the energy flow from production to customer in a better and more
beneficial way.
