Migration of digital cartography to CityGML; a web-based tool for supporting simple etl procedures

Abstract

Digital cartography is notably produced in all countries, in different scales and formats. Latest cartographic production aims at creating 3D objects with topological consistency and rich information linked by attribute tables, i.e. the principles behind data to be managed in geographic information systems (GIS) environments. These data contain all the information necessary for production of the first levels of detail (LOD) of the CityGML model. The work presented reports on the first steps for a guided workflow to upload cartographic data containing building footprints, heights and other information, and migrating it to a validated CityGML model. The steps include a web-portal for uploading the data in a compressed archive containing shapefiles, and a back-end Python script that reads coordinate vertices, attributes and other necessary information, and creates a CityGML file. The process was tested on the Italian topographic geodatabase of some of the main cities of Italy. Discussion on workflow steps and results are presented. Results show that this process is feasible and it can be used to facilitate first tests on transforming existing cartography to CityGML models, which can be then used for further analysis.