Publishing three-dimensional city models on the web

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method of Web publishing of three-dimensional city models generated from two-dimensional geographical data. In our approach, the city models are assumed to be historical ones. For an example, rows of houses of Kyoto of the Edo era are generated by determining the areas of the houses based on geographical data and by placing and three-dimensional house models correspondingly. We employed Google Earth as the viewer of the city models. The viewer is embedded into a web page which enables users to access the page to overview the city and look into buildings. Some important documents related to the buildings are also embedded. As an alternative use, we apply the method to generation of city models of tsunami-damaged area in Tohoku district, Japan. The model generation is based on the recovery plan and models are generated by taking changes of terrain in the area into account. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.