SPECIAL SECTION ON SMART CITIES

Received December 29, 2015, accepted January 6, 2016, date of publication January 13, 2016,
date of current version March 4, 2016.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2016.2517076

Managing Big City Information Based

on WebVRGIS
ZHIHAN LV1 , XIAOMING LI2,3 , BAOYUN ZHANG4 , WEIXI WANG2,3 , YUANYUAN ZHU1 ,
JINXING HU1 , AND SHENGZHONG FENG1
1 Shenzhen

Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Science, Shenzhen 518055, China

Research Center of Digital City Engineering, Shenzhen 518034, China
3 Key Laboratory of Urban Land Resources Monitoring and Simulation, Ministry of Land and Resources, Shenzhen 518034, China
4 Jining Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Science, Jining 272000, China
2 Shenzhen

Corresponding authors: Z. Lv (lvzhihan@gmail.com), J. Hu (jinxing.hu@siat.ac.cn), and S. Feng (sz.feng@siat.ac.cn)

This work was supported in part by the Electricity 863 Project under Grant SS2015AA050201 and in part by the National Natural Science
Fund for the Youth of China under Grant 41301439.

ABSTRACT A 3-D Shenzhen City Web platform based on the Web virtual reality geographical information
system is presented. A 3-D global browser is employed to load multiple types of demand data from the city,
such as 3-D building model data, residents information, and real-time and historical traffic data. Using these
data, a 3-D analysis and visualization of the citys information are conducted on a platform. The amount of
information that can be visualized with this platform is very large, and the GIS-based navigational scheme
enables great flexibility to access different available data sources. All the presented functions of the platform
are extracted from the customers practical demand. The system design considers some existing geographic
humancomputer interaction research results.
INDEX TERMS WebVRGIS, smart city, virtual geographical environment, e-government, HCI.
I. INTRODUCTION

At present, smart cities have already become a new pattern of

urban governance and social development in the information
era. The idea of smart cities is that they take full advantage of
the available information and communication technological
resources for sensing, analysing and integrating all types of
key information in the core system of urban operations, developing intelligent responses to all types of needs, including
peoples livelihoods, environmental protection, public security, urban services and industrial and commercial activities,
thus bettering city life for everyone. A smart city is not separate from a smart government. As a representative symbol
of a smart government on the Internet, a smart government
portal is one of the most important parts of the development
of a smart city.
According to this research which presents a different
type of three-dimensional spatial information framework
and application for todays urban construction and development, the level of technology and the efficiency of current
urban management and emergency response have to be
significantly improved, and unprecedented developments are
required in the engineering design and construction management area from two-dimensional dimensional drawings to
three-dimensional design and construction.
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In todays world, there is an increasing interest

developing the Virtual Reality Geographical Information
System (VRGIS), through which geospatial data can be
obtained to perform rich 3D analysis, calculations and
managements functions that are based on Geographical
Information System (GIS) data. WebVRGIS is a web version
of VRGIS that is recognized for its application in virtual
geographical environments. Accordingly, 3-D modes have
proven to be faster decision making tools that result in fewer
errors [31]. A parallel trend, the utilisation of big data has
rapidly become a hot research topic in recent years [1].
GIS data have several characteristics, including being large
scale, diverse predictable and available in real-time, which
can be classified as big Data [3]. In addition, the demand
by cities for the realistic display of VR systems to improve
modelling accuracy has increased, which results in the growth
of data volume. The virtual representation of a single building
to the scope of a city also results in the growth of data.
Moreover, concern regarding the usability of WebVRGIS
highlights a new challenge, which is the integration of various
big data of cities by a WebVRGIS platform and thus the
effective use of data. In addition to spatial data integration,
new user interfaces for geo-databases are also expected [2].
Therefore, the management and development of the big data

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of cities using virtual reality technology is considered to be

a promising and inspiring approach. There have been some
practical cases of cities using VRGIS as a visual smart tool
to manage a small amount of city data, for example, Italy [5],
Uppsala [20], Kyoto [29], and Shanghai [8]. Some
early related systems from both academia and industry
have inspired our work [4], [7], [14], [28], [33], [37][39],
[44][46]. As a practical tool, the most commonly used
functions of VRGIS are improved according to the practical
needs [19]. The customers on our platform are the staff of
governmental public service or social service agencies. The
junior version of our platform plans to use the public on the
right. All the provided functions depend on the customers
needs.
With the advent of the virtual cloud, big data has attracted
greater attention. Compared with traditional data, big data is
the frontier technology of data analysis. In short, it has the
ability to quickly obtain valuable information from various
types of data, which is the advantage of big data technology.
At present, big data has gradually infiltrated into every
aspect of our social lives. With the rise of social networks,
there is a large quantity of UGC (i.e., user generated content)
available, including audio, text information, video, pictures,
etc... The amount of data from other external sources is even
greater. Additionally, the mobile Internet contains a more
accurate and faster collection of user information, such as
user location, life information and other data. With all this
data, we have entered the era of big data. However, because
the pace of data development is so fast, which leads to
advanced hardware requirements, the development of large
data is a technical issue. Although the development of big data
is still in the primary stage in China, the commercial value
of big data has already appeared. First, information on gold
and transaction data can produce positive benefits. Second,
data mining will lead to the development of a number of
business models, each with a different orientation, or focus
on data analysis, for example, to help companies perform
internal data mining, focus on optimisation, more accurately
find users, reduce marketing costs, improve corporate sales,
or increase profits.
The arrival of the big data era, to some extent, is a new
challenge in mapping the geographic information sector,
if the big data applications destined to result in the healthy
future development of the Department of Surveying and
Mapping Geographic Information. However, it is reassuring
that the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping Geographic
Information has been made fully aware of the challenge and
is prepared to monitor geographical conditions and continuously promote the application of geographic information data
in China.
The arrival of the big data era, for geographic information enterprises, is not only the driving force for promoting
business transformation, but it also implies business opportunities. Enterprises need to rethink the existing business
model and promote new business transformation including
the combination of technology and operations management,
408

seizing business opportunities created by big data to obtain

more commercial value and development opportunities in the
geographic information industry.
With Shenzhens rapid urbanisation, its large-scale development and utilisation of underground space occupied
by skyscrapers and a metro system, results in a vertical
three-dimensional urban space that is complex and
dangerous. The data of a true three-dimensional urban space
framework have increasingly become the important foundation of urban planning design, construction management,
security protection and comprehensive competitiveness.
Currently, no three-dimensional GIS software platform is
suitable for the integration of high-performance aboveground and underground three-dimensional spatial data processing in any city. It is very difficult to completely and
accurately display a three-dimensional geographical space
with existing two-dimensional GIS technology; therefore,
a solution to the three-dimensional GIS bottleneck problem is
urgently needed. The focus of this research is to analyse a theoretical three-dimensional model and a large 3D city model
with above-ground and underground, indoor and outdoor
space entities, and their relationships, and other key technologies with a high efficiency of integrated management
and high performance visualisation. The contribution of this
research includes:
1) A spatial data model of three-dimensional spatial
entities that are systematically constructed to realise
the unified representation of oceans and land, aboveground and underground, indoor and outdoor objects,
discrete objects and continuous fields, multi-scale geometric model information and large-scale urban information, and the design of an expandable and highly
available hierarchical message bus (HMB)-based true
three-dimensional GIS system framework and universal functional interface.
2) Key technologies, such as a multi-level
three-dimensional spatial index, adaptive multilevel
caching, multi-thread coordination, and the development of a 3D spatial data engine provide reliable
technical support and visual analysis for the efficient integration of organisational management, largescale, multi-source, multi-scale and renewable and
three-dimensional spatial data.
3) The design and development of a modern CPU based
on a new generation of a three-dimensional realistic
visualisation engine, a breakthrough in the optimisation
and reorganization of scene geometry and texture data,
a real-time visualisation server cluster-client with asynchronous loading of a large-scale three-dimensional
complex scene and other key technologies that, greatly
improve the efficiency of visualisation.
4) The construction of Shenzhens three-dimensional
framework model with urban resident information and
traffic information data whose size is up to 2 TB,
to conduct a typical demonstration application in the
urban service and management field.
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In accordance with the governments public services, the

important significance of big data is to create greater public value of the data. With in depth exploration and access
to multi-dimensional analysis, online governmental public
services will be faster, more accurate, more convenient,
and closer to the publics requirements. To overcome the
shortcomings of the traditional supply service mode,
a new demand-oriented service model is created, consisting of a smart government portal website based on a
3D GIS platform. The basic difference between the smart
government portal sites and the traditional government
website is whether the former is fully aware of the diverse
needs of users. In addition, based on the understanding of
specific needs, the smart government portal website, based
on 3D GIS, makes a corresponding response and achieves
a positive interaction between supply and demand. The
construction of the system can provide more abundant and
authoritative information to the public to promote the rule
of law and the transparency of governmental operations.
In addition, higher quality services and higher efficiency
will be provided to the public to improve the governments
response and control of the publics requirements. Governmental management and public participation and responsibility can be thoroughly reflected in various public events and
public appeals on the Internet and in timely responses and
solutions.
At present, most government website portals are limited in
an unorganized way. As a result, it is very difficult for regional
or industrial leaders that are informationally competent to
comprehensively understand data on the operations and
services of government websites or to perform overall planning and top-level design for Shenzhen based on complete
and timely data. Therefore, one of the main components of a
smart government portal is to realise smart decision-making
and promote the transformation from decentralised decision
making to high-efficiency and centralised decision making.
Thus, it is necessary to establish an online governmental service decision-making analysis visualisation platform based
on big data. Website access data can be collected for an
analysis on business collaboration, demand and supply relations between different industrial or regional departments,
providing the basis for scientific decision making by the
government to plan and establish websites, which affords
informationally competent leaders and administrative leaders
with the knowledge to simultaneously develop government
websites and promote the overall smart transformation of the
Shenzhen region.
II. SYSTEM

In this work, we utilise a 3D model of Shenzhen as a

convincing case to present WebVRGIS [24], which is based
on a WebVR render engine [27]. Shenzhen is a young,
thirty-year old city, however, it has the highest population density in China, with 7785 people per square
kilometre (2013). It causes some embarrassment to the citys
information management section. Virtual environments have
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FIGURE 1. The UI of the proposed system.

proven to significantly improve public understanding of

3D planning data [6]. As shown in Figure 1, the presented
platform can assist social service agencies in making full
use of virtual reality and database technology to improve the
comprehensive level of the citys management service. The
presented platform is used to share the information resources
of all departments and for the dynamic tracking of the geospatial information of the citys population and companies, by
constructing an integrated information platform of social services. As a visual tool, the virtual reality application changed
the traditional image of the city [9].
Research on narrative visualisation and visualisation
annotation has been discussed [11], nonetheless, it is not in
the scope of this research. The 3D visualisation of urban
construction inventories and displays various types of data
management and resource data objects within a jurisdiction
area, attempting to grasp the work of social service agencies
to support the base of a holographic basic database, such
as a citys population, businesses, apartments, events, urban
components and other factors. 3D visualisation can achieve a
holographic data query of each family in a specific community by constructing a 3 D virtual house, and associating the
query with the relevant data.
Geographic statistical analysis can provide decisionmaking support for the management of social services, The
purpose of the collected data, including about a citys population, legal persons, houses, events and urban components,
are to assist in the management of decision-making and
behaviour data analysis. A variety of application scenarios are
constructed based on the jurisdiction area, and the community
or grid query statistics. Tables and graphics are presented
for easier comparisons [42], including pie, line, areascatter,
bubble and radar charts, histograms and normal distribution geographic or thermodynamic bitmaps (map dotted),
as shown in Figure 6. These figures can be derived
from macro to micro zoom analysis layer by layer. The
2D statistical analysis visualisation is overlapped with a white
background on a 3D virtual reality environment, because it
is more intuitive and a cognitively less-demanding display
system, which lessens the cognitive workload of the user [31].
A data center platform is a core platform used to store
informational resources from various information systems
and forms three basic databases (population, enterprise and
housing), medical treatment, health and other basic business
resource data-bases as well as network resource data-bases
from the Internet. These data are large in scale, and have
diversified structures and complicated content. For example,
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more than 3 billion data points were collected with respect to

electronic medical records for the residents of Shenzhen. Data
content includes structural data, non-structural data (such as
electronic medical records and Internet information), graphic
image data (such as medical CT images) and multimedia data
(such as video monitoring). Multiple, complicated problems
exist in data content, including missing and inconsistent data
and repeated information expression. At first, a holographic
pan database should be established for the unified management of all platform-related data and the formation of a basic
data resource. Accordingly, a graphic database and other
extended databases should be provided to support data of
different types. After the establishment of a holographic pan
database, a calculation framework should be established for
data mining analysis to meet the computation requirements
of relevant applications.
III. GRAPHIC USER INTERFACE

Geographic human-computer interaction (GeoHCI) is a popular topic in the CHI community [12]. Research on urban
interaction in an ubiquitous context [10], [32], [34] inspired
our work. With a 3D Earth model viewer, this system loads
all the 3D model data and 3D visualisation analysis results.
Using the cameras zoom horizon with the Zoom in function,
one can see the details of the construction level. By selecting
a house to investigate, the address and owner information
can be found and the house is revealed in a 3D scene. The
3D roaming function not only presents the community from
above, but it can also display the layout of the streets near the
building and further allow the user to observe the buildings
internal structure as shown in Figure 2. In addition to the
observation of the above-ground model, the underground data
beneath the city can also be observed and managed, as shown
in Figure 3.

FIGURE 4. Left: Subway route tracking; Right: City power grid.

On the website, the top position based on the observation

is conducted by a 2D birds-eye map on the left. The toolbar
at the top of the earth browser contains 3D GIS analysis
and urban data management, analysis and visualisation. The
tree-view management controls the upper left side of the layer
in the Earths browser. By clicking on the left side of the tree
view management control, a 3D model of each building and
room are shown.
The virtual community based [22], [47] city data analysis
function can result in a comprehensive observation of the
3D model of a community, analysing and displaying various data, including the populations age composition, educational background composition, nationality composition,
community marriage status and employment status as shown
in Figure 6. The population distribution in various areas of
the city is shown in Figure 5.

FIGURE 5. Left: Passenger flow forecast of various stations;

Right: Population distribution.

FIGURE 2. Left: 3D generated model of planned residence;

Right: Selected apartment.

FIGURE 3. Left: Above-ground city; Right: Underground data

(i.e. underground pipelines).
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This platform can manage urban traffic and road conditions

in real time and visualise road conditions in the form of lines
and by aircraft. In addition to real-time data, the platform
can also load historical data. This platform also manages the
data of bus, taxi and subway stations in Shenzhen as well as
the passenger flow forecast. By clicking on the deformation
along metro line button (100 m or 50 m), the system will
analyse the deformation along a metro line (100 m or 50 m)
and display the results of the projection of spatial or spatial cylindrical points representing the trend of deformation.
A cylinder or icon on the ground represents a rising deformation, and an underground cylinder or icon represents a sinking
deformation; height differences imply greater deformation as
shown in Figure 4.
In addition to the data visualisation and analysis of urban
areas, wilderness geographic data (including topography,
rivers, and lakes) complements urban design and planning.
Earthwork calculations are an important factor for the estimation of project costs and program selection. Therefore, before
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FIGURE 6. Education background composition; Children age composition;

Nationality composition.

administrative examination and approval management application service and other service systems will be constructed.
Building and housing management, a floating population and
rental estate autonomous application and other application
functions are constructed to realise the transformation of the
government social management mode, improve task performance and realise complex management. The third party
operation service system provides data supports to the third
party business data service system. Security protection, health
management and other industry specific services will be
provided.
IV. DATA UPDATE

FIGURE 7. Slope gradient analysis; slope aspect analysis; slope area

analysis; fill cut analysis.

FIGURE 8. Video surveillance and 3D spatial information seamless fusion.

the design phase of a project, the budget should be finalized

or the excavation and settlement of earthworks should be
achieved after the completion of the project. According to
the positive and negative calculation results, the calculation
methods of excavation and filling are similar. The platform
integrated some applied GIS analysis functions slope gradient
analysis, slope aspect analysis, slope area analysis, and fill cut
analysis, as shown in Figure 7.
In the expected monitored area, the real-time video
surveillance data are aligned to 3D spatial information and
is seamlessly fused according to the location information of
the camera. In Figure 8, the video over the layer is adjusted to
match the coordinate point via the users procedural manipulation (from left to right).
Big data application services includes governmental office
services and third party operational services. The government
office service platform provides support to the management application and the convenience of the regional governments effort. A social management application service,
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The data volume of the geographic space is growing and the

spatial data are not structured, thus the spatial data sets have
the typical characteristics of large data. Therefore, the problem of storing massive spatial data has been a key research
direction in GIS. Deciding how to share big data in GIS, how
to manage and protect large data files, and how to solve a large
number of data and other issues will be the new challenges
confronting GIS in the era of big data.
A large amount of GIS data continues to be compiled
through various methods, and the original data organisation,
analysis and processing methods become increasingly unable
to adapt to this massive amount of data. Thus, the problems
and challenges that become more serious in the era of big
data are how to improve the real-time update rate of the data
and the capacity for mass computing to meet the needs of the
users.
The dynamic updating of a 3D urban model database plays
a critical, decisive and comprehensive role in the development
of a smart city. If event driving is introduced as a factor
into the organisation and management of a citys spatialtemporal database, in the research on the dynamic updating
of a 3D urban model database, then the system can be used
to display the current status of a city in real time, forecast the
citys future planning conditions in a scientific manner, and
simultaneously recall and display the citys historical state.
A 3D urban model database is also massive. No matter
the establishment, updating, or maintenance stage, it has a
massive workload. The requirements of the database for construction and maintenance can be satisfied only by adopting
an appropriate updating mode. Thus, high-efficiency organisation and maintenance implementation can be realised for
3D urban model data.
A 3D urban model database is typically composed of one or
several programs. Each program can be divided into multiple
zones according to the range. Each program consists of a
topographic data set, a 3D model data set, a 3D semantic
topological data set, etc. Data of all data sets in the same
program must have the same spatial reference.
The event-oriented method is used to manage the spatialtemporal model of 3D urban model data via an objectoriented 3D urban model database. When a geographic event
causes changes in the condition of a corresponding
time-space object, an event list is introduced to record
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attribute information or change the interrelation information in various components of the corresponding event, and
indicate the time expression mode according to a certain order. Effective topological relation is also established
between the condition of the time-space object and the geographic event to provide a basis for a further tense operation.
In-depth research and comprehensive analysis is
performed on the content and the temporal and spatial variation features of the 3D urban model data, thus effectively
combining the geometry, attribute, scale and semantic information state of the 3D urban model data with the event
causing state variation, and exploring the spatial-temporal
database model of the state-based and event-driven multitense 3D urban model. Moreover, a citys history, current state,
planning model and other multi-tense 3D urban model data
are subject to high-efficiency organisation and management.
Furthermore, the spatial-temporal database model of a multitense 3D urban model is proposed by effectivly combining the
condition of the 3D urban model data with the event causing
state variation to realise the high-efficiency organisation and
management of a citys history, current state, planning model
and other multi-tense 3D urban model data.
A time-driven 3D urban model database updating method
is designed and realised. First, dynamic changes to the
3D urban model data are subjected to automatic matching and
monitoring. Then, a relationship is established between the
event and dynamic changes of the 3D urban model. Based
on the event-driven changes, the 3D urban model database is
updated. Then, a dynamic updating flow is established for the
3D urban model database, providing the basis for the dynamic
maintenance of the 3D urban model database.
This system adopts a semantic spatial-temporal data model
that is uniformly represented by a 3D urban model. In this
model, the spatial-temporal database model and storage structure of the event-based multi-tense 3D urban model data are
designed. Furthermore, a massive 3D urban model dynamic
updating method based on self-adaption matching is simultaneously proposed. Original data in the new data and database
are subjected to multi-layered automatic matching by establishing a matching and updating system for the geometry,
attributes, semantic topology and other information related
to the 3D urban model, realising a dynamic association of
the geometry, attributes, semantic topology and other information are related to the 3D time-space object. This model
provides the technical exploration necessary for the dynamic
updating of a 3D urban model database in this system, as well
as the technical support to guarantee the present situation of
a 3D urban model database.
V. IMPLEMENTATION

The 3D rendering layer of the platform is based on our

WebVRGIS engine which is developed by C++ and OpenGL
wrapped into the ActiveX plugin using the ATL library [24].
The website layer is developed by HTML, JavaScript, and C#.
The citys big data contains the land and ocean [25], [26],
[35], [36], above-ground and underground area, outdoor and
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indoor spaces, buildings and people in real-time historically

as well as forecasted. To solve the issue of a dynamic updating
of a massive 3D geo-database, an effective spatiotemporal
database model (SDM) based on events, semantics, and state
is employed in the system, which combines the semantics
and state of a 3D city model and its attributes with the
event causing the changes in the data semantics and state.
Through semantic classification, state expression and event
description, the SDM can organise and manage historical
and present data effectively. Thus, an updating method for
a 3D city model based on an adaptive matching algorithm is
proposed, which can automatically match the updating record
in the 3D geo-database according to the semantics, attributes
and spatial location of every virtual 3D city model. By means
of a real 3D geo-database, which has more than 1.5 million
3D city models, the experimental dynamic updating results
proved that the data model and updating method can significantly improve the data-management process. We plan to load
and test ten times the amount of 3D city data in our continuing research [16][18], [23], [41], [50]. The spatiotemporal
database model and visualisation have been considered in the
design of the system [51].
Data access supports multiple data interfaces such as
JDBC, ETL and data encapsulator. Safe data access through a
one-way safety net gate is necessary. A big data aggregation
processing platform is used to perform big data processing for a network on the holographic pan database, providing general software packages with such functions as data
transmission, storage, calculation framework and processing, structural/non-structural data support and high-efficiency
storage provision of holographic data in terms of industrial
application needs. Universal Restful API is used for standard interface encapsulation in terms of a big data aggregation service data access interface. For high concurrency
upper business requests, memcached, redis and other buffer
memory mechanisms are used to improve the concurrence
of the business interface. Additionally, nignx and other load
balancing mechanisms can be used to flexibly expand the
number of interface service nodes according to the users
concurrence scale. Some novel data-aware technologies may
improve future research [13], [15], [21], [30], [40], [43], [48],
[49], [52].
VI. EVALUATION

To evaluate the usability of the 3D city platform, a user study

is conducted. In our usability evaluation, participants were
found to provide very good scores for the 3D city platform
indicating that the system is a good substitute for the current
2D web map with a 2D spatial database. Experimental results
reveal that the participants consider the system easy-to-learn
and find it useful. Among other parameters, satisfaction
received lower scores, which indicates that the users need
time to get use to the 3D UI, and they are not sure about the
reliability of this platform. The overall rating of the 3D city
platform was high, which verified the usability and efficacy
of such a system [16].
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VII. CONCLUSION

With the development of the 3D geographic information

system and publics demands for 3D images, the development of a 3D traffic geographic information system is
inevitable.
The 3D Shenzhen case proves that a 3D city visualisation
and analysis platform is a useful tool for social service agencies and citizens who are browsing and analysing a citys big
data directly and is both immediately useful and generally
extensible for future applications.
This platform supports hierarchical 3D visualisation
expression for queries of a multi-scale citys big data,
3D visualisation expression for queries of various city events,
visualisation of decision-making plans and research on a
spatial analysis model based on a 3D space data model.
This platform utilises virtualisation, distributed computation
and cloud technology to guarantee safe and stable system
operation, improving the security and disaster tolerance of
data and the system to the greatest extent. Based on the
system framework of cloud computing, this platform broke
through the performance bottleneck of a traditional system,
realising real-time detection and intelligent monitoring of city
information, the easy processing of mass data, and meeting
the high performance needs of mass dynamic city information
for real-time processing. The developed platform is characterised by a strong application of load adaptability, wide
compatibility and easy expansion.
The user study preliminarily proved the usability of the
proposed platform. The user-need-oriented 3D GIS based
smart government portal enables rapid responses in real-time
and thorough the perception of users needs, so as to makes
timely improvements to the short service board, actively provides convenient, accurate and high-efficiency services to the
public and enterprises, improving the capability and level of
government in online public service.
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ZHIHAN LV is an Engineer and a Researcher of

virtual/augmented reality and multimedia major
in mathematics and computer science, having
plenty of work experience in virtual reality and
augmented reality projects, engage in application
of computer visualization and computer vision.
His research application fields widely range
from everyday life to traditional research fields
(i.e., geography, biology, and medicine). During
the past years, he has completed several projects
successfully on PC, Website, smartphone, and smartglasses.
XIAOMING LI was born in Shandong, China,
in 1984. He received the Ph.D. degree in photogrammetry and remote sensing from the Wuhan
University of China, in 2011. He is currently a
Researcher with the Shenzhen Research Center of
Digital City Engineering.
He is mainly engaged in research on 3-D GIS
and VGE, and city big data management.

BAOYUN ZHANG was born in Shandong, China,

in 1986. He received the masters degree from
Nanjing Normal University, in 2011. He is a Senior
Engineer with the Jining Institute of Advanced
Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His
main working direction is the high performance
calculation of the geographic information data.

WEIXI WANG was born in Henan, China, in 1978.

He received the Ph.D. in geodesy and survey engineering degree from the Liaoning Project Technology University of China in 2007. He completed his
post-doctoral fellowship with the Wuhan University of China in 2013. He is currently a Researcher
with the Shenzhen Research Center of Digital City
Engineering.
He is mainly engaged in research on BIM and
3-D GIS, and VGE.
YUANYUAN ZHU was born in Jiangsu, China,
in 1989. She received the masters degree in GIS
from the Wuhan University of China, in 2015.
She is currently a Researcher with the Shenzhen
Research Center of Digital City Engineering.
She is mainly engaged in research on 3-D GIS
and VGE.

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Z. Lv et al.: Managing Big City Information Based on WebVRGIS

JINXING HU was born in Hennan, China, in 1974.

He received the Ph.D. degree in GIS from the Perking University of China, in 2003. He is currently a
Researcher and the Assistant Director of the High
Performance Computing Research Center with the
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology,
Chinese Academy of Science, China. He is mainly
engaged in research on integration of 3S application, reference and core application of digital city,
analysis of disaster monitoring, and traffic data
mining.

VOLUME 4, 2016

SHENGZHONG FENG was born in Hubei, China,

in 1968. He received the bachelors degree from
the University of Science and Technology of
China, in 1991, and the Ph.D. degree from the
Beijing Institute of Technology, in 1997. He is currently a Professor and Deputy Director of the High
Performance Computing Research Center with
the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology,
Chinese Academy of Science, China.
He is mainly engaged in research on high
performance computing, grid computing, and bioinformatics.

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