CIPA 2003 XIX th International Symposium, 30 September - 04 October, 2003, Antalya, Turkey 
762 
Picture 3: Austria - a static view containing all disadvantages of 3D cartography, JOBSTMedia 
platform. Based on this first VRML 1.0 standard new 
developments completed some multimedia elements and 
resulted in VRML 2.0 and VRML 97 versions. 
Virtual worlds in VRML may consist of interactivity, 
animation, media implementation and texture mapping. 
The dynamical development stopped before the new version 
GEOVRML was released. In this version it was said that 
different geodetic coordinate systems are also taken into 
account. 
The release of a XML based VRML language called X3D 
generated new aspects in object oriented programming and let 
us expect an exceptional standard. 
The main disadvantages of VRML are the existing problems of 
rendering, streaming and synchronisation which lead to a loss 
of performance. 
VRML needs a Plugin to run in a webbrowser. There is the 
possibility that this Plugin is programmed in Java and the user 
does not need to install a Plugin, but as a result of the Microsoft 
policy the support of Java has to be installed as well. 
3.2Shockwave3D 
In opposite to the free available and programmable VRML, 
shockwave3d is an appropriate format released by the company 
Macromedia in 2001. The programming of an application has to 
be done in the authoring software Director, which uses its own 
programming language Lingo and is specialised for multimedia 
applications. The intention of enabling the 3D was to become a 
standard for online gaming. That is why all the needs for a 3D 
online game are treated, including streaming, bones animation, 
particle systems, physical behaviours, etc. . 
The main disadvantages of this format are its dépendance on the 
development and policy of the company and the high price for 
the authoring software. 
For instance the downloadable Plugin was free available a few 
years ago. Today the Plugin is only installable via 
Macromedias website - a local storage is prevented. Maybe the 
Plugin will not be free in future anymore. 
3.3Comparison 
The decision for the main platform of the 3D cartographic 
multimedia exploration system was not easy. Although the open 
source solution VRML has a lot of pro-arguments considering 
the free development and programming via text editor, the 
proprietary format shockwave3d was the favourite. 
The main arguments were the ability of streaming - which is 
useful for large file formats and multitasking -, the offer of 
several techniques that could be used for symbols, but were not 
explored yet - like particle systems - and the included 
rendering engines - a software, openGL and directX Tenderer. 
Depending on the hardware of the user, the best fitting engine 
will be used. 
All developed processes in this proprietary language “Lingo” 
are going to be documented in away that a transfer to another 
language will be possible in future. 
4.IMPLEMENTATION OF DATA 
4.1GencraI aspects 
The characteristic of a cartographic application is the regional 
overview showing dependancies of thematical features. For this 
small scale views a lot of data in lower quality are used. High 
detailed features have to be simplified according to algorithms 
of perception and generalisation in this small scales. 
The aim of the 3D exploration system is that very high detailed 
- large scale - models, coming from photogrammetry or 
archaeology, in the foreground are brought together with 
smaller scale features and simplified models in the background 
of the 3D view. There is the consideration that with this mixture 
of scales new discoveries, which were not visible until now, can 
be made by experts. 
Taking the idea of a free moving camera a step further a 
dynamic generalisation has to be introduced. Symbols for 
objects have to be created in realtime or read from a database 
and streamed into the camera view, while keeping up 
interactivity. 
In case of 3D building data some fundamental work is done by 
the institute for cartography and geoinformatics of the 
university Hanover [Thiemann 2002] and the institute for 
photogrammetry and cartography of the Bundeswehr university 
Munich [Forberg, Mayer 2002].