Spatial adjacency analysis of citygml buildings via 3d topological data structure

Abstract

Adjacencies between objects provides the most basic connectivity information of objects. This connectivity information provides support for more complex 3D spatial analysis such as 3D navigation, nearest neighbour and others. In 3D models, the connectivity information is maintained by building a comprehensive 3D topology. As the international standard for 3D city models, CityGML employs a simple XML links mechanism that references related entities to each other as a means of maintaining topological information. This method fulfils the purpose of relating connected entities but, it does not describe how the entities are related or in other words its adjacencies. In this study, a 3D topological data structure was utilised to preserve topological primitives and maintain connectivity information for CityGML datasets of buildings in LoD2. The adjacencies tested in this study were based on the topological links maintained by the Compact Abstract Cell Complexes 3D topological data structure. Four types of adjacencies were tested which are Point-to-Line, Line-to-Surface, Surface-to-Surface and Volume-to-Volume adjacency. As a result, all adjacencies were able to be executed for both datasets which consisted of two connected buildings and disjointed buildings. It was found that the ability of the 3D topological data structure to preserve topological primitives and build topological links supported the maintenance of connectivity information between buildings. The maintenance of connectivity information was also not limited to objects of the same dimension and could extend to connectivity between building elements in different dimensions.