Building standards

What is a Building? What does it do? is an excellent post that got me thinking about the implications of CityGML in metaverses like Second Life (SL).

As the Directions Mag article points out, “web services provide only graphic or geometric models, neglecting the semantic and topological aspects of the buildings and terrain being modeled.” Although geospatial apps are the obvious target of CityGML, can metadata space serve as a portal between SL-like metaverses and web-service oriented geospatial representations like Google Earth (GE)?

There are discussions about the inevitable evolution of Google Earth-type spaces towards 3-dimensional interactive metaverses, similar to the SL model. The idea is compelling, but what are the protocols of this convergence? Where is the connective tissue that will mediate the spatial transformations between the geospatial “mirror world” logic of GE, to the hyperbolic virtual geometries of SL.

Objects in SL can easily represent tangible information –semantic references, topological data, relative location coordinates, and can suggest intangible architectural information — atmosphere, usage or spatial expression. But in addition, is there a way to exploit the information space opened-up by CityGML so that new, unexpected spatial or informational dimensions can unfold ?