Pedestrians need support for efficient navigation within and among high-rise buildings to carry out their daily activities in 3D urban environments. Organisations that expand and grow in 3D urban spaces rely on their capacity for accurately locating, mapping and reporting asset information in a complex 3D context to support their effective asset management. Emergency operations in 3D urban settings depend on support for efficient navigation between locations in one or more multi-storey buildings. Metropolitan high buildings are typically represented as two-dimensional (2D) floor plans to outline floor-level space configurations or, as three-dimensional (3D) building blocks to illustrate the topography of urban areas. These conventional representations of urban space cannot provide effective support to pedestrian navigation, asset management, and emergency operations in urban areas with tall buildings. These applications all calls for a 3D geospatial database that supports interactive and efficient queries and calculations of alternative shortest paths and realistic, real-time 3D visualisation This paper focuses on the representation of inter-space connectivity within and among multi-storey buildings in 3D urban space and on the development of intelligent GIS applications in urban environment, such as querying the spatial patterns and conditions of people and things and their changes with time, finding the shortest or alternative paths and generating corresponding directions, and displaying the results in 3D visualizations / animations. The paper presents a case study on the development of a navigable 3D geodatabase for RMIT City Campus and the development of 3D GIS applications in supporting on-campus and within-building pedestrian navigation, emergency response, and asset/space management. The development of a 3D geodatabase is achieved by translating digital floor plans of selected buildings on RMIT city campus, in CAD format, into 3D shapefiles; building a 3D network dataset in which rooms, floors and buildings are connected via corridors, elevators, stairs, passages, and paths; and building a 3D room-use dataset in which selected room-specific and asset-specific attributes are incorporated. The developed 3D GIS applications include shortest path or alternative path calculation, room-specific or asset-specific database query, and 3D visualization of calculated paths or queried results. Research efforts are currently directed towards more cohesive integration of query-able 3D building models, navigable 3D network models and 3D databases of time-critical events and indoor spatial objects. The paper intends to demonstrate that effective iintegration of 3D urban / building model, 3D geodatabase, 3D network, and 3D visualizations can greatly improve our understanding of, and effectively support human activities in the 3D urban spaces which are expanding rapidly and becoming more and more complicated.
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