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In many countries, recent boosts in the construction and renovation sectors and energy efficiency directives are driving a growing interest in the built environment among designers and maintainers. In this context, customized software solutions tailored for Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Building Energy Modelling (BEM) are proving to be indispensable for optimizing operational efficiency within the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Owner, and Operator (AECOO) sector and for facilitating the generation of buildings' Digital Twins (DTs). These DTs rely on accurate geometry and ancillary information (semantics, sensors, etc.) to define properties of single elements, enabling crucial simulations in structural conditions or energy needs. However, BIM and BEM model creation and their enrichment with semantic information are highly time-consuming and prone to manual errors. Hence, there is an increasing demand for automatic methods featuring a high level of geometric accuracy to reconstruct building elements, such as walls, floors, and openings captured via 3D reality-based surveying. This paper introduces an automated method for creating Boundary Representation (B-Rep) models from 3D surveying data for the generation of digital building replicas. The method is based on the detection and computation of topological elements from 3D reality-based point clouds. It proves valuable for architectural or design workflows and for conducting energy or quality system simulations.

Solar energy is becoming increasingly important with the transition towards green and sustainable energy. Predicting solar irradiance is one of the core steps to optimise solar energy utilisation when planning and scheduling power grids. Accurate solar irradiance prediction can also help forecast microclimate conditions, enabling the analysis of citizens and planning of optimal intervention strategies for heating or cooling behaviour. This paper discusses a novel approach to computing the solar potential of buildings at the city level with promising scalability using semantic 3D city models. Experiments are conducted at different locations in the Netherlands. We evaluate our results by comparing them to the statistical Dutch data, and CitySim shows huge discrepancies in summer.

The role and adoption of 3D city models have been changing from a data endpoint to a centralised data source that is used for a variety of different analyses in different sectors. This change has not yet been fully completed and the transition process is still very noticeable at certain places. For example, data required for city-scale analyses are often missing, incorrect, or not stored in a standard way. A subset of these data (E.g. shell volume, shell area & footprint area) can be approximated from lower LoD shapes (LoD2.2 or lower) in the 3D city models. However, these models frequently simplify reality and therefore these approximations are not accurate. This paper proposes computing these data by voxelising Building Information Modelling (BIM) models representing the same buildings as the 3D city model. It is shown that a subset of these approximations (shell volume & footprint area) are more accurate than values computed from lower LoD shapes. Storing these data as attributes of the building models in 3D city models can improve the ease of use and the outcome of city-scale analyses. The computed values from BIM models can also be assigned to outputs of BIM to Geo conversions. This overturns the accuracy loss of the geometry caused by the conversion in which geometry is significantly generalised and simplified.

This paper presents a process to develop a CityGML-based 3D city model that, together with results from a flood simulation, can be used to investigate direct and indirect effects of floods on a city, its inhabitants and its critical infrastructure, and to quantify such effects by means of a Flood Resilience Score. In addition, the model can be used as a spatial planning support tool for urban planners to prioritise the redevelopment of certain areas and to test new spatial design decisions. First, a semantic 3D city model is prepared and enriched with additional building and infrastructure information. Then a Flood Resilience Score (FReSco) is defined and computed by quantifying the direct and indirect impacts of flooding on buildings, households, and critical infrastructure points using information from both the 3D city model and the flood simulation results. Lastly, a prototype of a spatial planning support tool is proposed to evaluate the flood resilience of a new environmental plan. As a case study, the neighbourhood of “Nieuw Kralingen” in Rotterdam was chosen. Overall, the outcomes of this work are meant to help cities better understand the impacts of flooding and adjust their urban planning activities accordingly. At the same time, the developed methodology also tests the strengths and limits of CityGML-based 3D city models in combination with openly available data and software.

This paper describes the proposed methodology, the implementation, and the experience resulting from the further development of a tool, embedded in Rhinoceros/Grasshopper, that allows to perform preliminary environmental analyses at district scale in the case of a new planned building. The CAD-based parametric 3D model of a “new” building, generated in Grasshopper, is enriched with and embedded into a 3D urban scene of the block/district where it is planned to be built. The resulting 3D scene is then used to perform shadowing, solar and wind analyses that are used by architects and engineers in their preliminary development phases of the project. The work stems from a preliminary analysis in terms of data and software requirements carried out between practitioners from both the GIS and AEC domain.More in detail, a series of modules in Grasshopper have been developed that allow to import GIS “surrounding” data at district scale (e.g. buildings, terrain) and to blend them with the “new” building model, in order to perform environmental analyses in (near) real time while the designer interactively changes the design parameters of the building and its position. The paper presents the results and discusses the inherent limitations.

3D city models are frequently used to acquire and store energy-related information of buildings for energy applications. In this context, CityGML is the most common data model, and the Energy ADE, one of its most complex extensions, provides a systematic way of storing detailed energy-related data in XML format. Contrarily, even though CityGML’s JSON-based encoding, CityJSON, has an extension mechanism, an energy-related CityJSON Extension is missing. This paper, therefore, presents the first results of the development of a CityJSON Energy Extension and space heating demand calculation is utilized as the use case. The simplified version of the Energy ADE, called the Energy ADE KIT profile, is used to create a semi-direct translation to the CityJSON Energy Extension. This Extension is then validated through the official validator of CityJSON and the use case, and improvements are made considering the validation results. The space heating demand is calculated according to the Dutch standard NTA 8800 for a subset of Rijssen-Holten in the Netherlands although the solar gains calculation requires further review. The results show that the final CityJSON Energy Extension provides full support for space heating demand calculations based on the NTA 8800 and eliminates the deep hierarchical structure of the Energy ADE. A comparison on CityJSON file sizes shows a 25.2 MB increase after the required input data is stored in a CityJSON + Energy Extension file, which is not significant considering the high amount of data stored in the file. Overall, this paper shows that the CityJSON Energy Extension could provide an easy-to-use alternative to the CityGML Energy ADE.

In the last 15 years semantic 3D city models have seen a steady growth in terms of creation and adoption. Many cities world-wide have now at least one city model which can be used for several applications. Energy- and sustainability-related topics are among those that have experienced a noteworthy increase of interest from the Geomatics community. 3D city models have become a steady component of Urban Energy Modelling, in which bottom-up approaches are developed to assess, for example, the energy efficiency of the building stock and to explore different scenarios of building refurbishment. Within this context, this paper focuses on investigating how much party walls can contribute to the energy demand estimation of a building. For this reason, two approaches to compute party walls are described and compared. The nature and the magnitude of their differences, as well as their possible impact on downstream applications, are considered in order to shed light on whether discrepancies in the amount of computed party wall area might lead to significant differences in terms energy demand of the residential building stock. The case study area is located in the Netherlands and encompasses the municipality of Rijssen-Holten.

This document introduces the process for the creation of a testbed for energy applications based on a semantic 3D city model for the municipality of Rijssen-Holten in The Netherlands. The creation of this dataset requires the consolidation from multiple data sources as well as a lot of manual work so the authors can warranty as much as possible the quality of the dataset so in can be used in several use cases. The data is stored following the OGC standard CityGML v2.0 and contain the geometrical and semantical information of CityObjects from the thematic modules Building, Vegetation and Relief. This data set consolidates the open weather data from the closest weather station to the study area located in Heino in the Netherlands. We discuss the decisions taken during the manual data collection process and we present some use cases that have already consume the dataset at the time of writing this document.

In this paper, five commonly used software tools to estimate solar radiation in the urban context (GRASS GIS, ArcGIS, SimStadt, CitySim and Ladybug) are run on the same test site and are compared in terms of input data requirements, usability, and accuracy of the results. Spatial and weather data have been collected for an area located in the Brazilian city of São Paulo, in the district of Santana. The test area surrounds a weather station, for which meteorological data of the last 15 years have been collected and used as ground truth when analysing and comparing the simulation results. In terms of spatial data, raster- and vector-based models of the study area have been generated in order to comply with the different input requirements. More specifically, in the case of the vector-based tools (SimStadt, CitySim and Ladybug), a common 3D model based on CityGML and containing buildings, vegetation (trees) and terrain has been generated and used as a common urban model. The paper presents the findings and discusses the results not only from a numerical point of view, but also from the perspective of the overall usability of the software in terms of data requirements, simulation time and task automatisation.

The 3D BAG v. 2.0 dataset has been recently released: it is a country-wide dataset containing all buildings in the Netherlands, modelled in multiple LoDs (LoD1.2, LoD1.3 and LoD2.2). In particular, the LoD2.2 allows differentiating between different thematic surfaces composing the building envelope. This paper describes the first steps to test and use the 3D BAG 2.0 to perform energy simulations and characterise the energy performance of the building stock. Two well-known energy simulation software packages have been tested: SimStadt and CitySim Pro. Particular care has been paid to generate a suitable, valid CityGML test dataset, located in the municipality of Rijssen-Holten in the central-eastern part of the Netherlands, that has been then used to test the energy simulation tools. Results from the simulation tools have been then stored into the 3D City Database, additionally extended to deal with the CityGML Energy ADE. The whole workflow has been checked in order to guarantee a lossless dataflow.The paper reports on the proposed workflow, the issues encountered, some solutions implemented, and what the next steps will be.

3D city models are playing a growing role worldwide as sources of integrated information upon which different urban applications are developed. In the context of urban planning and design, semantic 3D city models can provide plenty of qualitative and quantitative information about the urban context and of the area(s) to be transformed. This paper takes inspiration and continues a work recently published in which several design parameters and Key Performance Indicators are computed from a semantic 3D city model, and later used in a GIS-supported urban design process to develop a new area. As many of such parameters are derived from the gross volume of the building stock, this paper investigates whether and to which extent different building stock models might affect the estimation of the gross volume. The study is carried out in anticipation of the upcoming LoD2-based, country-wide model of the Netherlands that is being finalised by our team. At the same time, the paper investigates whether and which information can be obtained regarding the quality of the LoD2 model from a comparison with the LoD1 one, with a focus on volume calculation.

In many countries digital maps are generally created and provided by Cadastre, Land Registry or National Mapping Agencies. These maps must be accurate and well maintained. However, in most cases, the update process of these maps is still done by hand, often using satellite or aerial imagery. Supporting this process via automatic change detection based on traditional classification algorithms is difficult due to the high level of noise in the data, such as introduced by temporary changes (e.g. cars being parked). This paper describes a method to detect changes between two time steps using 2.5D data and to transfer these insights to a digital map. For every polygon in the map, several attributes are collected from the input data, which are used to train a machine-learning model based on gradient boosting. A case study in Haarlem, in the Netherlands, was conducted to test the performance of this proposed approach. Results show that this methodology can recognize a substantial amount of changes and can support – and speed up – the manual updating process.

The organisational data models that support the information needs of utility network managers are proprietary and domain-specific, while the emerging national standards in this field often lack lifecycle data representation capabilities. However, multiple types of utility networks can be comprehensively represented with the free and open-source Utility Network Application Domain Extension (ADE) of the international standard CityGML. The Operation & Maintenance (O&M) Domain Ontology is a proposed extended version of the Utility Network ADE that allows for consistent and comprehensive processing, storage and exchange of O&M-related utility network data. So far, this ontology has not yet been implemented in a spatial-relational database. Consequently, the support it offers during routine utility asset management tasks has remained untested. This paper, therefore, tests the support of the O&M domain ontology for asset management and proposes a database implementation of this data model. To this end, it models and loads two utility networks from the campus of the University of Twente, the Netherlands. It tests the ontology’s support for asset management by simulating a street reconstruction project and retrieving necessary project information in relation to a utility’s (a) maintenance history and performance, and (b) site conditions and valve locations. Results show that the implemented model supports projects with rapid, comprehensive, and consistent information about semantic details of utilities. Such data needs yet to be collected and registered systematically to enable future data-driven asset management practices.

Urban mining aims at reusing building materials enclosed in our cities. Therefore, it requires accurate information on the availability of these materials for each separate building. While recent publications have demonstrated that such information can be obtained using machine learning and data fusion techniques applied to hyperspectral imagery, challenges still persist. One of these is the so-called ’salt-and-pepper noise’, i.e. the oversensitivity to the presence of several materials within one pixel (e.g. chimneys, roof windows). For the specific case of identifying roof materials, this research demonstrates the potential of 3D city models to identify and filter out such unreliable pixels beforehand. As, from a geometrical point of view, most available 3D city models are too generalized for this purpose (e.g. in CityGML Level of Detail 2), semantic enrichment using a point cloud is proposed to compensate missing details. So-called deviations are mapped onto a 3D building model by comparing it with a point cloud. Seeded region growing approach based on distance and orientation features is used for the comparison. Further, the results of a validation carried out for parts of Rotterdam and resulting in KHAT values as high as 0.7 are discussed.

In urban planning, a common unit of measurement for population density is the number of households per hectare. However, the actual size of the households is seldom considered, neither in 2D nor in 3D. This paper proposes a method to calculate the average size of the household in existing urban areas from available open data and to use it as a design parameter for new urban development. The proposed unit of measurement includes outdoor and indoor spaces, the latter comprising both residential and non-residential spaces. As a test case, a to-be-planned neighbourhood in Amsterdam, called Sloterdijk One, was chosen. First, the sizes of “typical” households, as well as a series of KPIs, were computed in existing neighbourhoods of Amsterdam, based on their similarities with the envisioned Sloterdijk One plan. Successively, the resulting size of the household was used as a design parameter in a custom-made tool to generate semi-automatically several design proposals for Sloterdijk One. Additionally, each proposal can be exported as a CityGML model and visualised using web-based virtual globes, too. Significant differences among the resulting proposals based on this new unit of measurement were encountered, meaning that the average size of a household plays indeed a major role.

GIS has become an important part of many disciplines and supports a vast range of applications. It is used everywhere, from agriculture to public health care. Furthermore, with the advances in technologies, the availability of GIS data and software support has grown exponentially. In this paper, we present the results of our international survey to investigate the adoption of geospatial data, standards, and software by the practitioners in different application domains. The results demonstrate a clear trend towards the increased use of GIS in a number of application domains including architecture, geosciences, hydrology, and so on. We also explore the expectations of the users from the GIS technologies and provide some insight into the current status of 3D GIS data and its applications.

An investigation into the implementation state of open standards in software is currently ongoing through the ISPRS/EuroSDR ‘GeoBIM benchmark 2019’ initiative, which kicked off earlier this year. The benchmark activity provides a way of assessing and comparing the functionality of different software packages in GIS and BIM in terms of their ability to handle standardised data (IFC and CityGML) and undertake various tasks using this data. Approximately 65 people have registered to participate so far, with participants from a wide range of backgrounds and proposing to test a variety of software packages. This confirms that the issues under investigation are of interest, and also meets the wider benchmark aim of having a variety of participants, since the project is conceived as using a bottom-up approach with cross-disciplinary and cross-expertise participation. While full benchmark results are not due to be submitted until later this year, interim results have highlighted a number of common issues across multiple software packages, and a web meeting for participants held in July 2019 also led to some improvements in how the benchmark results are being captured.

The cities in which we live are constantly evolving. The active management of this evolution is referred to as urban planning. The according development process could go in many directions resulting in a large number of potential future scenarios of a city. The planning support system URBio adopts interactive optimization to assist urban planners in generating and exploring those various scenarios. As a computer-based system it needs to be able to efficiently handle all underlying data of this exploration process, which includes both methodology-specific and context-specific information. This article describes the work carried out to link URBio with a semantic city model. Therefore, two key requirements were identified and implemented: (a) the extension of the CityGML data model to cope with many scenarios by the proposition of the Scenario Application Domain Extension (ADE) and (b) the definition of a data model for interactive optimization. Classes and features of the developed data models are motivated, depicted and explained. Their usability is demonstrated by walking through a typical workflow of URBio and laying out the induced data flows. The article is concluded with stating further potential applications of both the Scenario ADE and the data model for interactive optimization.

Precise and comprehensive knowledge about 3D urban space is required for simulation and analysis in the fields of urban and environmental planning, city administration and disaster management. In order to facilitate these applications, geo-information about functional, semantic, and topographic aspects of urban features, their mutual dependencies and relations is needed. Substantial work has been done in the modelling and representation of above-ground features in the context of 3D city modelling. However, the belowground part of the real world, of which utility networks form a big part, is often neglected. Existing data models for utility networks are generally very domain-specific and, therefore, not suitable either. This paper describes a 3D data modelling approach for integrated management of below-ground utility networks and related above-ground city objects. This approach consists of manipulating first the structure of existing utility data in the commonly used Feature Manipulation Engine ETL software in order to make the data compliant to the CityGML Utility Network ADE data model. Subsequently, workspaces are created that take care of storing the CityGML data into the free and open-source 3D City Database, which has been extended in order to manage utility network data, too. Moreover, the research shows the suitability of the extended 3DCityDB to perform graph-based topological operations by means of the PostgreSQL pgRouting extension. Lastly, the results are visualized in typical GIS applications, e.g. QGIS and ArcGIS.

Recent advances in semantic 3D city modelling and a demand from utility network operators for multi-utility data models integration have contributed to the emergence of an open Application Domain Extension (ADE) of the CityGML data model tailored to multiple types of utility networks. This extension, called the Utility Network ADE, is still in active development. However, work is already well underway to create data samples and to develop methods of modelling thereupon. In this paper, a mapping of the Utility Network ADE data model to a relational database schema is introduced. A sample of a freshwater network using the Utility Network ADE and based on data from the city of Nanaimo, Canada, is also presented. This sample has also been imported into a relational database schema built upon the 3DCityDB (a database implementation of CityGML) extended with a schema of the Utility Network ADE. Further to this, a series of basic network analysis functions have been defined and implemented in SQL to interact with the database so as to carry out sample atomic processes involved in network modelling, such as reading semantic properties of elements, calculating composite physical parameters of the network as a whole, and performing simple topological routing to serve as a guiding example for further and more complex development. A brief outlook is also presented, suggesting areas with high potential for future research and development of this nascent data model.

Growing urbanisation, its related environmental impacts, and social inequalities in cities are challenges requiring a holistic urban planning perspective that takes into account the different aspects of sustainable development. One crucial point is to reconcile urban planning with environmental targets, which include decreasing energy demand and CO2 emissions, and increasing the share of renewable energy. Within this context, the project CI-NERGY aims to develop urban energy modelling, simulation and optimisation methods and tools to support decision making in urban planning. However, there are several barriers to the implementation of such tools, such as: fragmentation of involved disciplines, different stakeholders, multiplicity of scales in a city and extreme heterogeneity of data regarding all the processes to be addressed. Project CI-NERGY aims, among other goals, at overcoming these barriers, and focuses on two case study cities, Geneva in Switzerland and Vienna in Austria. In particular, project CI-NERGY faces several challenges starting with different cities, heterogeneous data sources and simulation tools, diverse user groups and their individual needs. This paper describes the experiences gathered during the project. After giving a brief overview of the project, the two case study cities, Geneva and Vienna, are briefly presented, and the focus shifts then on overall system architecture of the project, ranging from urban data modelling topics to the implementation of a Service-Oriented Architecture. Some of the challenges faced, the solutions found, as well some plans for future improvements are described and commented.

This paper describes a methodology to assess the energy performance of residential buildings starting from the semantic 3D city model of Vienna. Space heating, domestic hot water and electricity demand are taken into account. The paper deals with aspects related to urban data modelling, with particular attention to the energy-related topics, and with issues related to interactive data exploration/visualisation and management from a plugin-free web-browser, e.g. based on Cesium, a WebGL virtual globe and map engine. While providing references to existing previous works, only some general and introductory information is given about the data collection, harmonisation and integration process necessary to create the CityGML-based 3D city model, which serves as the central information hub for the different applications developed and described more in detail in this paper. The work aims, among the rest, at developing urban decision making and operational optimisation software tools to minimise non-renewable energy use in cities. The results obtained so far, as well as some comments about their quality and limitations, are presented, together with the discussion regarding the next steps and some planned improvements.

This paper presents and discusses the first results regarding selection, analysis, preparation and eventual integration of a number of energy-related datasets, chosen in order to enrich a CityGML-based semantic 3D city model of Vienna. CityGML is an international standard conceived specifically as information and data model for semantic city models at urban and territorial scale. The still-in-development Energy Application Domain Extension (ADE) is a CityGML extension conceived to specifically model, manage and store energy-related features and attributes for buildings. The work presented in this paper is embedded within the European Marie-Curie ITN project “CINERGY, Smart cities with sustainable energy systems”, which aims, among the rest, at developing urban decision making and operational optimisation software tools to minimise non-renewable energy use in cities. Given the scope and scale of the project, it is therefore vital to set up a common, unique and spatio-semantically coherent urban data model to be used as information hub for all applications being developed. This paper reports about the experiences done so far, it describes the test area in Vienna, Austria, and the available data sources, it shows and exemplifies the main data integration issues, the strategies developed to solve them in order to obtain the enriched 3D city model. The first results as well as some comments about their quality and limitations are presented, together with the discussion regarding the next steps and some planned improvements.

This paper presents and discusses the results regarding the initial steps (selection, analysis, preparation and eventual integration of a number of datasets) for the creation of an integrated, semantic, three-dimensional, and CityGML-based virtual model of the city of Vienna. CityGML is an international standard conceived specifically as information and data model for semantic city models at urban and territorial scale. It is being adopted by more and more cities all over the world. The work described in this paper is embedded within the European Marie-Curie ITN project “Ci-nergy, Smart cities with sustainable energy systems”, which aims, among the rest, at developing urban decision making and operational optimisation software tools to minimise non-renewable energy use in cities. Given the scope and scale of the project, it is therefore vital to set up a common, unique and spatio-semantically coherent urban model to be used as information hub for all applications being developed. This paper reports about the experiences done so far, it describes the test area and the available data sources, it shows and exemplifies the data integration issues, the strategies developed to solve them in order to obtain the integrated 3D city model. The first results as well as some comments about their quality and limitations are presented, together with the discussion regarding the next steps and some planned improvements.

No abstract available.

Many important Cultural Heritage sites have been studied over long periods of time by different means of technical equipment, methods and intentions by different researchers. This has led to huge amounts of heterogeneous "traditional" datasets and formats. The rising popularity of 3D models in the field of Cultural Heritage in recent years has brought additional data formats and makes it even more necessary to find solutions to manage, publish and study these data in an integrated way. The MayaArch3D project aims to realize such an integrative approach by establishing a web-based research platform bringing spatial and non-spatial databases together and providing visualization and analysis tools. Especially the 3D components of the platform use hierarchical segmentation concepts to structure the data and to perform queries on semantic entities. This paper presents a database schema to organize not only segmented models but also different Levels-of-Details and other representations of the same entity. It is further implemented in a spatial database which allows the storing of georeferenced 3D data. This enables organization and queries by semantic, geometric and spatial properties. As service for the delivery of the segmented models a standardization candidate of the OpenGeospatialConsortium (OGC), the Web3DService (W3DS) has been extended to cope with the new database schema and deliver a web friendly format for WebGL rendering. Finally a generic user interface is presented which uses the segments as navigation metaphor to browse and query the semantic segmentation levels and retrieve information from an external database of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI).

More and more cities are moving towards the creation and adoption of three-dimensional virtual city models as a means for data integration, harmonisation and storage. To this purpose, CityGML is an international standard conceived specifically as information and data model for semantic city models at urban and territorial scale. The automatic building reconstruction process, up to the Level of Detail 2 (LoD2) can be achieved nowadays nearly completely automatically and with a high degree of accuracy, provided that high quality input data (e.g. a dense DSM obtained from LiDAR or dense stereo-matching with 10÷15 pt/m2 or better) are provided. This paper deals indeed with the creation of a CityGML-compliant, LoD2 city model starting from sub-optimal datasets and tries to address some of the issues tied with the use of sub-standard data – which however, represents a quite common case in “real life”. As study area, a part of the city of Trento, in the northern Alpine region of Italy, was chosen and contains about 2300 buildings of different typology, use and construction year. Only existing datasets were gathered and used.

The paper presents the research carried out in the on-going 3DSolarWeb project to test and implement a complete pipeline for the generation of a solar cadastre of building roofs located in alpine areas. The project aims at providing reliable results in a costeffective way, using (low resolution) available data and new aerial imagery acquisitions as input. The environmental context is digitally represented using already existing low resolution LiDAR data (1–2 m resolution), while the urban area is modelled using high resolution aerial images (10–20 cm GSD) and photogrammetric DSM. Reliable models and algorithms for the estimation of the incoming sun radiance are then adopted and a WebGIS is set up for the interactive calculation of the photovoltaic (PV) potential in a raster-based form. The paper summarizes the entire pipeline and the results (Figure 1) achieved on the test areas to show the potentialities of the method and the web-based service.

An architectural heritage object carries heterogeneous and multi-layered information beyond physical characteristics. It requires an integrated representation of various types of information for understanding and management prior to the decision-making process of conservation. This requirement is a twofold manner consisting of representation and management processes. There exists a variety of approaches for representation of heritage objects in digital three-dimensional (3D) environment, but the selection of the appropriate one according to the needs is crucial. On one hand, there have been recently great attempts to adopt Building Information Modeling (BIM) for historical buildings. Nevertheless, the related works in the topic focus mainly on pre-processing of data, such as the integration of born-digital material into a BIM environment and the creation of parametric objects according to historical building characteristics. As the information management of a historical building requires enhanced attribute management and integration of different datasets, further investigation on the BIM capabilities in management terms is crucial. On the other hand, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have great potentials in exploring spatial relationships, but their potential in 3D representation is still somehow limited. The paper reviews and evaluates the roles of BIM and GIS, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages for integration, retrieval and management of heterogeneous data in the context of historical buildings.

The Pleiades mission is part of the French-Italian ORFEO system (Optical and Radar Federated Earth Observation) and has the aim to provide very-high resolution optical imagery from space for civilian and military needs. Within the Pleiades evaluation program, the 3DOM Unit at the Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento (Italy) received a triplet by Pleiades-1A over Trento testfield for research purposes. The images composing the triplet were acquired on August 28, 2012 with across-track angles close to nadir and alongtrack angles of 18°, -13° and 13° in average with respect to the flight direction (Fig. 1) and a mean GSD between 0.72 m and 0.78 m. The aim of this paper is to investigate the quality of the Pleiades triplet and derived Digital Surface Model (DSM). The image analysis was conducted by evaluating the radiometric properties of the images (noise characteristics, image artifacts, spilling) and the geometric accuracy. After image orientation, three DSMs were generated with advanced image matching algorithms using two image combinations and the triplet. The DSMs were compared to the reference Lidar DSM (1 m grid spacing) for quality analysis in areas with different characteristics (land use and cover, topography). Thanks to the availability of other very high resolution satellite imagery in the testfield, the results were compared to those previously obtained using WorldView-2 ad GeoEye-1 stereopairs acquired on the same area.

The paper reviews the state-of-the-art in 3D city models and building block generation, with a description of the most common solutions and approaches. Then the digital reconstruction and comparison of LoD1 and LoD2 building models obtained with commercial packages and using different input data are presented. As input data, a DSM at 1m resolution derived from a GeoEye-1 stereo-pair, a DSM from an aerial block at 50 cm GSD and a LiDAR-based DSM at 1 m resolution are used. The geometric buildings produced with each dataset are evaluated with respect to some ground-truth measurements but also compared between them. Problems such as the quality of the input DSM, the accuracy of the necessary vector datasets containing the building footprints, the flexibility of the approaches and the potentialities of each dataset will be discussed. As reconstruction of the building models is largely influenced by the quality of the building footprints, which may be out-of-date or slightly shifted with respect to the employed DSMs/DTMs, an in-house method is being developed to derive them starting from the produced DSMs.

The aim of this study is estimating solar radiation on building roofs in complex mountain landscape areas. A multi-scale solar radiation estimation methodology is proposed that combines 3D data ranging from regional scale to the architectural one. Both the terrain and the nearby building shadowing effects are considered. The approach is modular and several alternative roof models, obtained by surveying and modelling techniques at varying level of detail, can be embedded in a DTM, e.g. that of an Alpine valley surrounded by mountains. The solar radiation maps obtained from raster models at different resolutions are compared and evaluated in order to obtain information regarding the benefits and disadvantages tied to each roof modelling approach. The solar radiation estimation is performed within the open-source GRASS GIS environment using r.sun and its ancillary modules.

Continuous technological advances in surveying, computing and digital-content delivery are strongly contributing to a change in the way Cultural Heritage is "perceived": new tools and methodologies for documentation, reconstruction and research are being created to assist not only scholars, but also to reach more potential users (e.g. students and tourists) willing to access more detailed information about art history and archaeology. 3D computer-simulated models, sometimes set in virtual landscapes, offer for example the chance to explore possible hypothetical reconstructions, while on-line GIS resources can help interactive analyses of relationships and change over space and time. While for some research purposes a traditional 2D approach may suffice, this is not the case for more complex analyses concerning spatial and temporal features of architecture, like for example the relationship of architecture and landscape, visibility studies etc. The project aims therefore at creating a tool, called "QueryArch3D" tool, which enables the web-based visualisation and queries of an interactive, multi-resolution 3D model in the framework of Cultural Heritage. More specifically, a complete Maya archaeological site, located in Copan (Honduras), has been chosen as case study to test and demonstrate the platform’s capabilities. Much of the site has been surveyed and modelled at different levels of detail (LoD) and the geometric model has been semantically segmented and integrated with attribute data gathered from several external data sources. The paper describes the characteristics of the research work, along with its implementation issues and the initial results of the developed prototype.

The aim of this study is the estimation of solar irradiance on building roofs in complex Alpine landscapes. Very high resolution geometric models of the building roofs are generated by means of advanced automated image matching methods. Models are combined with raster and vector data sources to estimate the incoming solar radiation hitting the roofs. The methodology takes into account for atmospheric effects, site latitude and elevation, slope and aspect of the terrain as well as the effects of shadows cast by surrounding buildings, chimneys, dormers, vegetation and terrain topography. An open source software solution has been developed and applied to a study area located in a mountainous site and containing some 1250 residential, commercial and industrial buildings. The method has been validated by data collected with a pyranometer and results made available through a prototype WebGIS platform.

Today the use of spaceborne Very High Spatial Resolution (VHSR) optical sensors for automatic 3D information extraction is increasing in the scientific and civil communities. The 3D Optical Metrology (3DOM) Unit of the Bruno Kessler Foundation (FBK) in Trento (Italy) has collected stereo VHSR satellite imagery, as well as aerial and terrestrial data over Trento, with the aim to create a complete data collection with state-of-the-art datasets for investigations on image analysis, automatic digital surface model (DSM) generation, 2D/3D feature extraction, city modelling and data fusion. The testfield region covers the city of Trento, characterised by very dense urban (historical centre), residential and industrial areas, and the surrounding hills and steep mountains (approximate height range 200-2100 m) with cultivations, forests and bare soil. This paper reports the analysis conducted in FBK on the VHSR spaceborne imagery of Trento testfield for 3D information extraction. The data include two stereo-pairs acquired by WorldView-2 in August 2010 and by GeoEye-1 in September 2011 in panchromatic and multispectral mode, together with their original Rational Polynomial Coefficients (RPC), and the position and description of well distributed ground points. For reference and validation, a DSM from airborne LiDAR acquisition is used. The paper gives details on the project and the dataset characteristics. The results achieved by 3DOM on DSM extraction from WorldView-2 and GeoEye-1 stereo-pairs are shown and commented.

The annual 3D GeoInfo Conference aims at bringing together international state-of-the-art research and facilitating dialogue on emerging topics in the field of 3D geoinformation. On the 1st and 2nd of October 2018, the 13th 3D GeoInfo conference was organised at the Delft University of Technology. On this occasion, the topics included 3D data collection and modelling, reconstruction methods for 3D representation, data management for maintenance of 3D geoinformation or 3D data, applications of 3D geoinformation, and visualisation.This volume of the ISPRS Annals contains the 12 full papers that received the most positive double-blind peer reviews from the Scientific Committee of the 3D GeoInfo Conference. The other 33 presented papers are published in the ISPRS Archives.We hope that the papers in this special issue will inspire decision-makers, academics, engineers, computer scientists, land surveyors, urban planners, and students interested in the 3D geoinformation domain. We would like to thank all the authors, the reviewers, and the organising committee for their valuable contribution towards this publication.We would like to acknowledge that we have received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 677312 UMnD: Urban modelling in higher dimensions).

Dolomites in 3D thanks to laser scanner Peak3D is the project created to return in three dimensions the verticality of the mountains. In this project 8 companies and institutions are involved : The University of Pavia, The Foundation Bruno Kessler, The University of Padua, The University of Milan Bicocca, Codevintec, Helica, Gexcel and Protocube. Peak3D has dedicated itself to the Dolomites detected by the laser scanner. The data obtained allow many uses.

In a previous work, authors have proposed a medico-legal definition of femicide as the murder due to the failure to recognize the right of self-determination of women. The aim of this paper was to apply the proposed definition to a cohort of cases to characterise femicides and female homicides and assess whether femicides can be considered a distinct entity or not. A comparison between female and male homicides was performed to assess common and distinctive features. Femicides were identified and compared to the cohort of non-femicide female murder. Results were compared to those reported in published forensic studies. Significant associations between female and male homicides were found for sex and partner/ex-partner offender, sex and indoor homicide and sex and asphyxia as dynamic of death emerged. A higher prevalence of indoor homicides and asphyxiation and of partner relationships were documented in female homicides. Gunshot, blunt injuries and cut wounds are well represented in both types of homicides. Most affected sites are back and chest in male homicides, and head, breasts, pubis, and limbs in female homicides. When comparing femicides and female homicides, a positive association between strangulation as harmful mean and a negative one between femicides and indoor homicides were found. Male and female homicides can be considered as two distinct victimological phenomena. Focusing on femicide allows to establish injuries and circumstantial patterns, that could represent evidence of a specific murder. More studies with a standardized data collection are needed to corroborate the theory of this paper., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Femicide refers to the extreme form of violence against someone belonging to the female gender, i.e. the killing of a woman. Research shows that, to date, gender-based violence remains largely a hidden phenomenon with prevalence often being underestimated by official statistics and data missing in numerous countries. It can be argued that the under-reporting may be suggestive of a legislative gap that needs addressing. This work aims to reach a shared medico-legal definition of femicide stemming from a comprehensive review of the current legislation of countries around the world. In addition, it appraises forensic pathology studies focusing on the murder of women as well as the most relevant documents published by prominent international organizations fighting violence against women. Review of the literature shows a scarcity of national legislations concerning specifically femicide, despite the attention given to this phenomenon by international organizations fighting violence against women. Additionally, a non-homogeneous framing of the term femicide arises from the forensic pathology literature and national laws. Starting from one of the funding principle of medical ethics - autonomy - authors propose to define femicide as a murder perpetrated because of a failure to recognize the victim's right to self-determination. This definition would give the forensic pathologist a central role in identifying femicide cases among the murders of women. A shared forensic approach is needed, ideally employing standardized methodology to compare international data and to standardize scientific research in the field., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)