3D Web Services And Models For The Web: Where Do We Stand?

In the past years, numerous open source projects have started to display 3D globes and 3D data on the web. Standardizing web services, data format and representation models is, therefore, a very hot topic. There are in particular ongoing efforts on the OGC side as well as on the W3C side. The OGC has released a draft candidate for a 3D web service W3DS, the ISO X3D standard proposes an XML-based file format for representing 3D computer graphics and the W3C is considering adding X3D rendering into HTML5. Other projects implement their own web services and formats. On the implementation side, Geoserver supports W3DS and X3D, the X3DOM library prototypes a possible implementation of X3D HTML5 integration and last but not least, browsers with WebGL support are fully able to handle the representation of 3D data on the client side. The talk is going to detail the mentioned elements, show demonstrations of existing implementations and try to suggest a possible path into the 3D web for the FOSS4G community.