CityThings: An integration of the dynamic sensor data to the 3D city model

Devices from the Internet of Things are being increasingly used in everyday life, and they provide a massive amount of data in various formats. While implementing the Smart Cities initiative, these data are integrated and utilized together with the 3D city model for further applications. Based on Open Geospatial Consortium standards, heterogeneous sensor data can be integrated with the Open Geospatial Consortium SensorThings Application Programming Interface. Similarly, the 3D city model data can be stored and exchanged with the Open Geospatial Consortium CityGML format. However, currently, there is no concrete model to integrate these sensor data with the 3D city model using the Open Geospatial Consortium standards. The existing solution for integrating the sensor data into the 3D city model requires an extension or plug-in for adding the data to the CityGML model. In this paper, we introduce the concept of “CityThings” to integrate dynamic sensor data from the Open Geospatial Consortium SensorThings API into the CityGML 3D city models. We demonstrate the implementation of the CityThings concept in the Smart Villages project in the study area of Wüstenrot, Germany, by integrating dynamic sensor data from several systems including solar panels, agro-thermal plants, and weather monitoring sensors to visualize the sensor data with the 3D city model on the web platform. In the future, this concept can be applied to interconnect dynamic sensor data and 3D city model data in other Smart Cities applications.