Prototyping Information Visualization in 3D City Models: a Model-based Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a model-based method for rapidly prototyping visualization techniques in 3D city models, addressing limitations of current tools and lack of formalized descriptions.

Contribution

It proposes representing visualization techniques as graph transformations specified with SPARQL over RDF graphs for quick prototyping.

Findings

Allows formal specification of visualization techniques

Enables rapid generation of 3D city model visualizations

Addresses limitations of existing geodata tools

Abstract

When creating 3D city models, selecting relevant visualization techniques is a particularly difficult user interface design task. A first obstacle is that current geodata-oriented tools, e.g. ArcGIS, have limited 3D capabilities and limited sets of visualization techniques. Another important obstacle is the lack of unified description of information visualization techniques for 3D city models. If many techniques have been devised for different types of data or information (wind flows, air quality fields, historic or legal texts, etc.) they are generally described in articles, and not really formalized. In this paper we address the problem of visualizing information in (rich) 3D city models by presenting a model-based approach for the rapid prototyping of visualization techniques. We propose to represent visualization techniques as the composition of graph transformations. We show that these transformations can be specified with SPARQL construction operations over RDF graphs. These specifications can then be used in a prototype generator to produce 3D scenes that contain the 3D city model augmented with data represented using the desired technique.