Visualisation conformity of three dimensional IMGeo for emergency response

Abstract

The past seventy years the number of disasters that occur, man-made and natural, has increased. This problem requires suitable and efficient means to control and respond to emergency situations. Currently, the emergency responders use maps and software that allows for two dimensional visualisations of situations. Meanwhile the development of visualisation software continues. In the Netherlands the interest in CityGML, software for 3D city visualisation, has vastly increased after the 3D pilot ‘NL’, coordinated by Geonovum. As a result of this interest, Geonovum has set up a Dutch CityGML format, which is an extension of the existing 2D IMGeo format. This extension contains the standard 3D objects that make up a city, but might lack objects that are required specifically for disaster fighting. A three dimensional environment could provide a better overview of a location than a 2D map and also allow for 3D, and thus more realistic, computations such as 3D distance, 3D flow computation, 3D visibility analysis and for example flood simulations. These possibilities could have profits for emergency responders but might require extensions of the IMGeo information model and its data before IMGeo can be used for emergency response. There are a lot of organisations, actors, involved in emergency response. Based on their experience, obtained insight and a literature study, this thesis researched to what extent IMGeo and CityGML comply with the user requirements for an emergency response model. The results indicated that IMGeo covers the basics of an emergency response model, but that a lot of scenario related objects are missing (e.g. dikes). These objects are to be combined per scenario and thus form scenario based modelling; the base of this research. This modelling allows dosed relevant visuals of the model. which is important since too much information will slow down a model and could counteract the user.