A GIS Platform for Automatic Navigation into Georeferenced Scenes Using GIS Scene Explorer (GIS-SE)

During the last decade the rapid evolution of GIS systems has led to enchanced accessibility and increased availability. The traditional content has been enriched by multimedia information and three dimensional models. Virtual copies of the real world have been created, widely known to the average user, yet the information retrieval and the efficient exploration of 3D large scale scenes are still pose serious problems. In this paper, a GIS platform for automatic navigation is presented, using a prototype application, entitled “GIS-Scene-Explorer” or GIS-SE, addressing these problems. Our platform is based on an existing GIS platform. Google Earth is used for this purpose. The prototype is a standalone application, adopting the Google Earth API to retrieve and visualize data. It takes advantage of both public remote database of the GIS system and a custom, collaborative database. Three dimensional models of buildings and multimedia data are stored to the collaborative database, operating under a server – client model architecture.