Urban Data Services and Visualization (UD-SV) project

Quick links

• Online demos

Objective of the UD-SV project

UD-SV (Urban Data Services and Visualization) is a set of software components dedicated to the experimentation, exchange and sharing of both knowledge and tools for the concrete handling of urban/city data (that are based on the CityGML data model).

The UD-SV project adopts a practical approach and focuses on technical specificities of the full city data flow starting from database integration of raw data and ending in advanced visualizations of their downstream numerical treatments. UD-SV adopts an open approach and favors:

• the adoption of mainstream standards of the urban modeling field
• the re-use (and possible improvement/evolution) of existing open source software components

In particular UD-SV focuses on the design and realization of

• a backend:
  • an infrastructure enabling the storage of city related data,
  • an infrastructure for hosting and executing computational models (using the local backend data as well as online open data).
• a frontend:
  • a simple interactive visualizer of the backend data
  • a computational model treatment handler (configure, trigger, explore results of a treatment)

A list of available/used components is described in the Component section.

Technical manifesto

We believe that in order to succeed with data usage one must not separate data concerns (information models, database infrastructure) from the offered tools, treatment process and the associated methodology. Questions like how to migrate a database when the information model changes (e.g. from CityGML version 2 to version 3), how to deal with information model modularity and extensions, what are the interactions between data and their treatment or how does one handle data storage and computation scale up, must be dealt at first. UD-SV will try to propose good practices for doing so.

Seeked backend/frontend features

Aimed backend features

The aimed backend features could be:

• offer some ETL tools starting from standard (or de facto standards used by mainstream crowd sourcing site like OpenStreetMap) of City related data
• distributed logical data (?)
• abstract level data access (i.e. use accessor API that are directly derived out of UML expressed information models
• computational model execution engine

Aimed frontend features

The aimed frontend features could be:

• 3D visualization of a territory
• Use the iTowns JS/WEBGL component (?)

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Alternative illustrations

Data formats and tools activity as a graph