Interoperable Web-based 3D Analysis of Laser Scanning Data for Location-based Mobile Applications

Abstract. One of the current trends of mobile computing are location-based services. For those services and many other applications like navigation systems it is often necessary to know what portion of the client‟s environment is visible from the current location. For this purpose analyses of three-dimensional elevation data are necessary, which are increasingly acquired by airborne laser scanning. 3D analyses available for mobile devices require a fast query response as the position of the client device may change quickly. This work shows the possibility to make 3D analysis based on highly accurate airborne laser data available for mobile applications using the example of line-of-sight analysis. A service-oriented architecture based on the OGC Web Processing Service is set up and used to evaluate performance of Web-based 3D analysis for mobile devices. The results indicate that LBS on mobile devices using 3D laser data can be provided with appropriate request time via standardized web interfaces.