ABSTRACT
During the last few years, digital 3D city models have achieved a high presence as valuable planning tools used by a large number of public administrations and private firms spread all over the world. Initially, the early use of 3D city models has been dominated by visualization only, and the main purpose was providing public access to users for an attractive view of the urban environment and all its geographic elements in a certain area, taking advantage of 3D models for tourism and marketing tasks. In recent times, by virtue of new software and new modeling technologies, 3D spatial and non-spatial information has been implemented in several cities. Consequently, 3D city models have become estimable for various domains beyond visualization and have been extended to larger number of tasks, such as urban planning, disaster simulation, virtual-heritage conservation and many others. However, on the one hand, the increasing number of different applications that employ 3D city models, where each of them requires its own specific LoD, and on the other hand, the complexity of 3D model generation process, have led to a fuzzy vision about the real possibilities of utilization that 3D city models have.
