The initial project area has 12sqkm and covers approx. 17.000 buildings. The City of Neuss will use and manage the 3D model with the software SupportGIS.

Building footprints from ALK (“Automatisierte Liegenschaftskarte”)The 3D model will be semi-automatically derived from existing stereo aerial images using COWI’s powerful and in-house developed software tools based on Microstation. The official 2D building footprints from the German ALK (“Automatisierte Liegenschaftskarte”) will be used to create overhanging roofs and to generate one proper 3D building per official footprint. The result is a consistent 3D dataset that can be managed together with the ALK footprints in SupportGIS.

CityGMLThe 3D model will be delivered by COWI in the standard format CityGML (www.citygml.org). CityGML is a common information model for the representation of 3D urban objects. It defines the classes and relations for the most relevant topographic objects in cities and regional models with respect to their geometrical, topological, semantical and appearance properties. In August 2008, the members of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) have adopted version 1.0.0 of CityGML as an official OGC standard.

Use and management in SupportGISThe City of Neuss will use and manage the 3D city model in the software SupportGIS (www.supportgis.de). SupportGIS/JAVA 3D (SGJ3D) is a software application that is based on the outline concept of ISO-/OGC-compliant 2D/3D-geospatial data management and uses a database model. Thus it allows detailed description of object-oriented geographic data as well as mapping these data on the data scheme.