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3DTGIS Architecture

“Long experience indicates that, all else being equal, military practitioners and their civilian supervisors who purposely make geography work for them are winners more often than not, whereas those who lack sound appreciation for the significance of geography succeed only by accident”

                         - John Collins,
                           Military Geography: For Professionals and the Public

Geospatial-intelligence requires the integration of multiple types of information, such as information relating to the terrain, buildings, roads, bridges, earthworks, etc. Each type of information must be collected, represented, and modeled at a level of detail and fidelity commensurate with the analyst’s requirements. Today’s quick response, high precision warfare places has increased the need for visualizing representations high fidelity and analyzing representations with physics-based accuracy. Military planners require line-of sight analysis, network analysis, penetration analysis, munitions selection/assessment, and battle damage forecasts. 

There is growing interest within the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) community in integrating 3D and GIS to take advantage of 3D GIS's capability for better visual effects and more powerful analytic capability than its 2D GIS counterpart. 3D based graphics provide increased visualization functionality such as rendering, zoom and pan, rotation, and viewpoint manipulation. Although better visualization greatly increases user understanding of 3D entities within a geographic space, there remains a need for integrated analyses capabilities that support complex battlefield decision making. 

The focus of KBSI’s Implementation of a Geospatial Three Dimensional Topology Model (3DTGIS) initiative was to provide 3D-based analytic computations that can satisfy the more demanding requirements of battlefield decision making. 3TDGIS uses an innovative 3D topology-based non-manifold representation approach that provides the ability to integrate a solids modeling capability with COTS GIS systems widely used within the DoD community. 

The 3TDGIS technology's Radial-Edge representation of individual objects captures the topological relationship within every 3D geographic entity and stores those relationships, providing a theoretically sound foundation for an intra-relation query. An Octree was used in the technology to provide the inter-relation information for relationships among disjoint objects.  In our multi-representation approach, Octree was a complement to 3D topological boundary representations, and the integration of the two schemas served as the best option for 3D GIS.