CityGML is an open data model for representing and exchanging city-related 3D geospatial data in an XML-based format, such as buildings, terrain, and vegetation. It was developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and many cities manage their 3D city models in the CityGML data structure, which serves numerous purposes from land use planning to solar cadastre and dissemination of city information, especially 3D building representations. Esri has collaborated with con terra and SAFE software to build a set of tools to make CityGML based features such as 3D buildings, vegetation, land use, and street furniture available in ArcGIS as a scene layer package or stored as features in a file geodatabase.
Workflows
Download CityGML Toolbox to your desktop to get started. The download includes a set of geoprocessing tools for converting CityGML data (version 2.0). You need ArcGIS Pro with the ArcGIS Data Interoperability extension to run the tools. Included in the download are workbench versions of the tools for use with Safe Software's FME.
With the CityGML tools, you can import buildings, vegetation, plant cover, land use, street furniture, traffic cover, bridges, and tunnels into the geodatabase. This allows you to edit, analyze the data in your ArcGIS, and publish the data later on using the internal scene layer creation tools. You can also convert building type features (buildings, tunnels, bridges) directly into a scene layer package and nothing will be stored in the file geodatabase.
Once you have created a scene layer package, you can use and consume it in several ways within the ArcGIS platform. You can view it directly in ArcGIS Pro by dragging and dropping it into any scene. ArcGIS Earth and any custom native applications built with ArcGIS Maps SDKs also support scene layers. To share data on the web, you can upload the SLPK to ArcGIS Online or Enterpriseand publish a scene layer that can be used in any application based on the ArcGIS Maps SDKs.
Required software
You need ArcGIS Pro with ArcGIS Data Interoperability extension or Safe Software's FME to convert CityGML to a scene layer package. You need an ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise publisher account to publish and share scene layers.
Explore the following resources to learn more about importing CityGML in ArcGIS.
ArcGIS help documentation
Reference material for ArcGIS products:
ArcGIS blogs, stories, and technical papers
Supplemental guidance about concepts, software functionality, and workflows:
Open-source scripts and tools
Find open-source scripts and tools for working with CityGML:
Esri community
Online places for the Esri community to connect, collaborate, and share experiences:
- Ask the 3D community questions.