Integration of GIS Data for Visualization of Virtual Geospatial Environments

In this paper, we propose an approach to generate Virtual Geospatial Environments (VGE) using data provided by Geographic Information System (GIS). The resulting VGE provides a spatial representation of the real world for visualization and simulation purposes. Conventional VGE approaches are generally built upon a grid-based spatial representation, raising the well-known problems of the lack of accuracy of localized data and the difficulty to merge data with multiple semantics. Our approach overcomes these limits by using a precise spatial decomposition technique that relies on a graph-based topological model. Moreover, our approach integrates, merges, and propagates semantics associated with GIS data including when these later spatially overlap. We illustrate this model with an application which extracts geographic, topologic and semantic data from standard GIS files, and allows a user to navigate and retrieve information from the computed VGE.