Towards an Integrated Visualization Of Semantically Enriched 3D City Models: An Ontology of 3D Visualization Techniques

3D city models - which represent in 3 dimensions the geometric elements of a city - are increasingly used for an intended wide range of applications. Such uses are made possible by using semantically enriched 3D city models and by presenting such enriched 3D city models in a way that allows decision-making processes to be carried out from the best choices among sets of objectives, and across issues and scales. In order to help in such a decision-making process we have defined a framework to find the best visualization technique(s) for a set of potentially heterogeneous data that have to be visualized within the same 3D city model, in order to perform a given task in a specific context. We have chosen an ontology-based approach. This approach and the specification and use of the resulting ontology of 3D visualization techniques are described in this paper.