Development of MIT geospatial data to CityGML workflows

Abstract

BlindAid is a virtual environment system that helps blind people learn in advance about places they plan to visit. A core component of the BlindAid system is the actual set of virtual models that represent physical locations. In order for BlindAid to be useful, there must be a means to generate new virtual environments. The research in this thesis explores the process of translating geospatial data received from MIT into the CityGML data format, which will then be used to generate virtual environments for BlindAid. We discuss the main challenge of preserving both geometry and semantic information with respect to different data formats. We also identify several initial workflows for geospatial data obtained from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Facilities, including Sketchup, GIS Shapefile, and Industry Foundation Class models. These workflows serve as a foundation that we can build upon to bring in a variety of geospatial data to BlindAid in the future.