Design and Implementation of 3D Geospatial Open Platform Based on HTML5/WebGL Technology

Recently, the utilization of geospatial open platforms has been constantly increased and the interest in 3D geospatial data such as terrain, building and shopping mall has been increased significantly. In particular, rather than simplified 3D geospatial data, interest in high-precision 3D geospatial data which similarly represents the real world objects has increased significantly. In order to satisfy the demand for such the high-precision 3D geospatial data, various kinds of 3D geospatial open platforms has been developed and has provided services on the web. However, most of the 3D geospatial open platforms have been used plug-in module in order to ensure a fast 3D rendering performance on the web, despite the many problems such as difficulty of the installation, no supporting of cross browser/operating system and security issues. In addition, recently, the existing 3D geospatial open platforms based on plug-in module are facing a serious problem, by declaring the NPAPI service interruption in Chrome and Firefox browsers. In this study, we presents the design and implementation of a new 3D geospatial open platform based on HTML5/WebGL technology without the use of plug-ins. Such the new 3D geospatial open platform based on HTML5/WebGL may support cross browsers such as IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and cross OS platforms such as Windows, Linux, Mac and mobile OS platforms.