October 28, 2015 - 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 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. 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 ( www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/140). Comments are due by 27 November 2015. The candidate standard is hosted on GitHub, making it is easy to follow the latest changes and the rationales behind those changes.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 515 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.

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