When creating 3D city models, selecting relevant visualization techniques is
a particularly difficult user interface design task. A first obstacle is that
current geodata-oriented tools, e.g. ArcGIS, have limited 3D capabilities and
limited sets of visualization techniques. Another important obstacle is the
lack of unified description of information visualization techniques for 3D city
models. If many techniques have been devised for different types of data or
information (wind flows, air quality fields, historic or legal texts, etc.)
they are generally described in articles, and not really formalized. In this
paper we address the problem of visualizing information in (rich) 3D city
models by presenting a model-based approach for the rapid prototyping of
visualization techniques. We propose to represent visualization techniques as
the composition of graph transformations. We show that these transformations
can be specified with SPARQL construction operations over RDF graphs. These
specifications can then be used in a prototype generator to produce 3D scenes
that contain the 3D city model augmented with data represented using the
desired technique.Comment: Proc. of 3DGeoInfo 2014 Conference, Dubai, November 201