A Standard-based Model for the Exchange of 3D Geological Data

A wide range of methodologies and software applications have been developed to generate 3-Dimensional (3D) geological model data. One of the main open issues is the exchange of these heterogeneous data from different sources, which influences the sharing and integration of 3D geodata. It is also a necessity to take into consideration the semantics of 3D geological data to enable its full exchange. A standard based geologic data model (sGDM) is proposed to offer an xml-based data exchange of 3D geological models. sGDM totally reuses the standard of GeoSciML declared by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) as the core module for defining geological feature objects. Then geological features can be integrated into a geological model within a top-to-down architecture of geological model – feature group – geological feature. The Symbology Encoding (SE) standard from Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is utilized and extended by sGDM to define 3D visualization parameters of geological features. Besides, sGDM has benefited from several other existing standards, such as X3D proposed by Web 3D Consortium, WMS, SLD, CityGML etc. that proposed by OGC. To evaluate the sGDM, we also presented a high level prototype architecture for the integrated, xml-based storage and management of 3D geological data. In this architecture, data user and provider can exchange information through a communication method using sGDM-defined xml streams.