The membership of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC 3D Portrayal Service (3DPS) Standard.

In the last decade, progress in airborne and mobile laser scanning and photogrammetric methods has brought an explosion of terrain data and detailed 3D models of the built environment. The 3d models are often maintained in proprietary environments.
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the Web3D Consortium have both been working to address the need for interoperability, as well as the content challenges of volume, access speed, and diversity of devices. The Web3D Consortium has focused on open standards for real-time 3D visualization, including streaming, and their members developed a Geospatial Component extension for X3D. The OGC has focused on developing a service interface to provide interoperable access to 3D geospatial data servers. In 2012, a group of OGC members, building on work done in both organizations, completed the 3D Portrayal Interoperability Experiment (3DPIE) to develop and evaluate best practices for 3D portrayal services.

Based on the results of the 3DPIE, an OGC 3D Portrayal Service Standards Working group (3D Portrayal Service SWG) was chartered to progress two different OGC proposals to the state of one integrated, adopted OGC standard. The current draft candidate 3D Portrayal Service Standard, a unified web service for 3D portrayal, is intended to make it easy for applications to present, explore, and analyze complex 3D geospatial data from diverse sources.

The candidate OGC 3D Portrayal Service Standard is designed to support both client and server side rendering. For client-side rendering, the client requests a 3D model from the server. The server extracts the requested model from the 3D geodata server and generates a 3D scene graph including geometry and textures. Depending on the server’s capabilities, data formats such as X3D, KML and COLLADA can be used to retrieve the scene graph. The rendering of the scene is done on the client side. In a web client, X3DOM and/or XML3D can be used to integrate the scene into an immersive HTML5 experience. However, there are no fixed format requirements, opening the service for other technologies such as JSON-based glTF. For server side rendering, the client passes the requested content and view parameters to the server. The server then generates layered image depictions of the 3D environment for display on the client. In either scenario, the client’s user can query and navigate through the 3D content.

The documents for the candidate OGC 3D Portrayal Service Standard are available for review and comment at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/130. Comments are due by 27 February, 2015. The candidate standard is hosted on GitHub, making it is easy to follow the latest changes and the rationales behind those changes.

[Source: OGC press release]