Abstract: | Geographical Information Systems (GISs) represent a powerful tool for capturing, storing, manipulating, and analyzing geographic data. This tool is being used by various geo-related professionals, such as surveyors, cartographers, photogrammetrists, civil engineers, physical planners (urban and rural), rural and urban developers, geologists, etc. They use the tool for analyzing, interpreting, and representing the real world and understanding the behavior of the spatial phenomena under their respective jurisdictions. Almost all of the systems used by the geoinformation community to date are based on two-dimensional (2D) or two-and a half-dimensional (2.5D) spatial data. In other words, one may find difficulty processing and manipulating spatial data of greater dimension than 2 in the existing systems, resulting in inaccurate or at least very incomplete information. In geomatics or geoinformatics we consider real world objects exist in three-dimensional (3D), thus it is desirable to have a system which is able to store, handle, manipulate, and analyze objects in a 3D environment. |
