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TOWARDS 3D LBS - CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES 
F. Wang 2, *, J. W. Liu b 
a AGIS - GIS lab, University of the Bundeswehr Munich, D-85577 Neubiberg, Germany - fei.wang@unibw.de 
b TerraIT, Beijing Venture Plaza, Chaoyang District Beijing 100101, P.R. China - liujunwei@terra-it.cn 
Commission VI, WG VI/5 
KEYWORDS: GIS, Intemet/web, CAD, Services, Three-dimensional, Standards, Database 
ABSTRACT: 
Geospatial locations are increasingly considered as a very important factor for providing diverse kinds of public or proprietary 
services, such as map services including the real time navigation function, and social network services such as the buddy-finding 
feature. These services are always based on the geospatial locations and therefore named as Location Based Services (LBS). LBS as 
a special stream of GIS have been widely researched in the GIS community. As the rapid developments of mobile devices, wireless 
networking, location sensing techniques and other ICT, LBS have boomed in the industry and achieved great revenues all over the 
world. However, most existing LBS can only deal with two dimensional geospatial data and offer related 2D geospatial services. 
They lack in supporting three dimensional datasets as well as 3D services. To use the existing and newly emerging 3D datasets and 
implement different 3D based LBS systems based on existing 2D LBS systems or from scratch, some important issues have to be 
investigated. This paper discusses core components of LBS in detail and also provides a prototype for demonstrating the 
methodology of upgrading a 2D LBS system to the 3D LBS one. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
Nowadays, geospatial data are increasingly used in many 
different domains. The users are also moving from GIS 
professionals to the laymen. More and more people know how 
to find their houses or surrounding restaurants via the web map 
services like Google Maps. In the mean time, various location 
sensing technologies are becoming mature and have already 
started to serve mobile devices to obtain their location 
information. Typical technologies are GPS and 
telecommunication infrastructure assistant positioning using a 
number of known points, etc. Location information thus 
becomes a basis and an enabler for acquiring ubiquitous 
geospatial related services. 
LBS defined by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) as “A 
wireless-IP service that uses geographic information to serve a 
mobile user. Any application service that exploits the position of 
a mobile terminal' (ISO, 2005) are becoming more and more 
useful in our daily life, such as the car navigation, tourism 
system, emergency rescue, disaster management, social 
networking and many other value-added applications. 
The big advancements of mobile devices, wireless networking, 
locating techniques and other ICT technologies lead LBS as a 
special stream of GIS. In the last few years, LBS have boomed 
in the industry and achieved great revenues. According to a 
latest report from ABI Research, LBS revenue is forecast to 
reach an annual global total of US$ 13.3 billion by 2013 (ABI, 
2008). 
In the mean time, 3D information is rapidly increasing, which is 
partly due to the fast data acquisition techniques such as 
terrestrial laser scanning and photogrammetry. 3D data can 
bring people more vivid presentations of the real world, for 
example, a person walks in a virtual world surrounded by 3D 
simulated reality objects for tourism or shopping, or a scientist 
estimates the climate disaster via an interactive 3D scene. 
Therewith 3D GIS has been paid more attentions in GIScience 
(Zlatanova et al., 2002), including researches on 3D data 
modelling, visualisation, query and analysis (Penninga and 
Oosterom, 2007; Pigot, 1992). Although implementing 3D GIS 
is not an easy task, those promising and attracting features 
represented by 3D virtual world will be widely spread and 
extended to the current 2D GIS step by step. 
However, most existing LBS can only deal with 2D geospatial 
data, that is, to receive 2D locations from the mobile user and to 
respond 2D maps to the user. They support little or nothing to 
3D geospatial data. As mentioned, 3D information brings more 
useful benefits to GIS and will be the next scenario for 
upcoming LBS (Zlatanova and Verbree, 2003). Therefore, it is 
necessary to investigate the method about how to upgrade a 2D 
LBS system to the 3D LBS one, in order to fulfil the 
progressive user demands. 
Either 2D or 3D LBS can be considered as a collection of 
various technologies. This paper firstly analyzes LBS as the 
following core components: mobile devices, location sensing 
techniques, data standards and standardized geospatial web 
services. The detailed description of the above LBS core 
components is introduced and necessary changes when 
upgrading 2D LBS to 3D LBS is discussed. Afterwards, a 
prototype using the methodology of upgrading an existing 2D 
LBS system to the 3D LBS system is explained. Finally, 
conclusions and the outlook are given.