Focus for 3D city models should be on interoperability: not verisimilarity!

3D city models have become a very popular commodity for cities in general. The politicians and/or the administrative management have in the last few years been very active when it comes to investments in dimensionality, and the models come in many different forms and for many specific or non-specific purposes. The trend until now has shown that municipalities and developers in most cases have given high priority to the visual impact of these models. It has been more important for the cities to obtain a model that gave a high degree of verisimilarity in contrast to a model that had a high degree of interoperability. Verisimilarity would in this case mean a 3D model with close resemblance to reality and based on modelling principles from CAD and scenes from this, build with focus on photorealism. Interoperability would mean a 3D model that included semantics in form of an object model and an ontology that would make it useful for other purposes than visualisation. Time has come to try to change this trend and to convince the municipalities that interoperability and semantics are important issues for the future. It is important for them to see that 3D modelling, mapping and geographic information are subjects on the same agenda towards an integrated solution for an object-oriented mapping of multidimensional geographic objects in the urban environment. Many relevant subjects could be discussed regarding these matters, but in this paper we will narrow the discussion down to the ideas behind a development of a system called GRIFINOR, that can handle multidimensional geographic objects as Java-objects. GRIFINOR is a new platform for 3D geovisualization. The purpose of the GRIFINOR platform is to provide researchers and developers with an open source platform, a counterpart to proprietary developments in Geographical Exploration Systems. Centralized and proprietary Geographical Exploration Systems only give us their own perspective on the world. On the contrary, GRIFINOR is decentralized and available for everyone to use, empowering people to promote their own world vision.