7 November 2011. During the well-attended OGC 3D Summit in Boulder,
Colorado the first ever OGC 3DIM Award was given to the
3D Pilot NL, a unique network of over 65 private, public and
scientific organizations who collaborated to push 3D developments in
the Netherlands. The four national organizations who succeeded in
establishing this collaboration network are the Kadaster, Geonovum
(the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) executive committee
in the Netherlands), the Netherlands Geodetic Commission and the
Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment. With this award the
3D Pilot team is recognized for its significant
accomplishments in aligning national and international standards
for 3D content data sharing. The pilot project established the
groundwork for one of the world’s most comprehensive national 3D
geo-information programs.
The mission of the OGC 3D Information Management (3DIM) Domain Working
Group is to facilitate the definition and development of standards for
sharing and accessing 3D geo-information. According to members of the
Working Group, “The developments in the Netherlands serve as an
inspirational example of a national implementation of a 3D
standard.”
3D Pilot NL
The objective of the 3D Pilot NL was to accelerate the use of 3D
geo-information in the Netherlands. Initiators of the 3D Pilot NL were
Kadaster (Dutch national cadastre and mapping agency), Geonovum (the
National Spatial Data Infrastructure executive committee in the
Netherlands), the Netherlands Geodetic Commission and the Dutch
Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment. More than 65 private,
public and scientific organizations collaborated on use cases and a
test bed to study the establishment of a national standard on 3D
geo-information.
Added value of 3D over 2D information 

The pilot has demonstrated the added value of 3D geo-information
compared to 2D geo-information in various use cases, including
interactive airstream simulation, 3D cadastre, mutation detection and
integrated planning and management of underground and aboveground
municipal assets. Also, 3D information automatically generated from
laser point data can serve many application domains. Such information
about tree heights and sizes, new buildings, roofs, etc. can easily
become part of an OGC CityGML model. Demonstrations of use cases can
be found at
www.geonovum.nl/dossiers/
(on Youtube).
Standardization 

One of the main achievements of the pilot was the establishment of a
national 3D standard based on an international standard. The
Netherlands’ 3D standard integrates the OGC CityGML Encoding
Standard [http://www.opengeospatial.
version of the existing national Information Model for large scale
Geo-information (IMGeo). IMGeo contains object definitions for large
scale representations of roads, water, land use/land cover, bridges,
tunnels etc. and prescribes 2D point, curve or surface geometry for
all objects. As the new version of IMGeo will be completely integrated
with CityGML, IMGeo version 2.0 will also facilitate 2.5D and 3D
geometries. The close integration between an existing information
model for 2D geo-information and CityGML is a major step toward the
practical use and re-use of 2D and 3D information.
3D Pilot continues
The next phase of the 3D Pilot NL started in October 2011. This phase
focuses on the development of tools and instruments to support the
implementation of the 3D standard. This includes generating IMGeo 2.0
example data at various levels of detail; describing standard
procedures to generate such data; describing standard procedures to
update and maintain the 3D data as part of existing (2D) information
processes; and developing a 3D validation tool. In addition, special
attention is being paid to aligning standards from the construction
domain (Building Information Models) and the spatial data domain, at
both national and international levels. Almost 120 participants
have subscribed to participate in this next phase (
www.geonovum.nl/dossiers/3d-
More information
More information is available in Dutch at
www.geonovum.nl/dossiers/
at:
www.geonovum.nl/sites/default/
and www.geonovum.nl/dossiers/
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 430 companies,
government agencies, research organizations, and universities
participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available
geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions
that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and
mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make
geospatial information and services useful with any application that
needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at
http://www.opengeospatial.org/