Evaluation of Three-Dimensional Urban Modeling Projects Based on Volunteered Geographic Information of OpenStreetMap

Three-dimensional modelling of environment and buildings especially in urban areas are used in many fields such as facility management, urban management, disaster management, navigation, traffic management, and tourism. Collecting spatial data by professional and commercial providers often need to spend high cost and time, which is the major reason that Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has become more attractive to professionals in the geo-information industry in last few years. One of the most popular VGI projects is OSM. In the early beginnings, OSM included only two-dimensional (2D) data, but now more and more users also share 3D-compliant data. Many projects have been created to demonstrate 3D model, which is extracted from OSM database. The aim of this research is to introduce some of these projects based on OSM project, review each case, and determine the unique characteristics of each one. Moreover, based on the criteria defined for displaying three-dimensional, projects have been compared with each other and the advantages and disadvantages of each project are discussed. The results of this research can be used in development of three-dimensional modeling and future research to create new three-dimensional model.