Formats wirth support for 3D geometries

[samtux]

I would like to be described more about the support for 3D vector data storage and representation. I think KML is good for this case, I don't know if it's the same for the other formats, including Shapefile.

[jachym]

@thorsten-reitz already addressed this issue in his pull request

I do not have actually strong opinion about this, since 3D is solved on different scale differently (CityGML vs. BIM). Maybe someone else has opinion, to which scale 3D is needed for the future geospatial format?

[thorsten-reitz]

File Geodatabases and CityGML both offer some capability for 3D geodata. For me the practical issue was that often a user would not be able to work with these, since their software didn't provide support for either, or only partial support (e.g. the OpenFGDB GDAL driver doesn't cover some 3D and texture features). In other words, they went back to Shapefile, but the result is the triangle soup geometry without any materials or textures. Note that textures and materials can also be used to encode analytic results and measurements, it's not just about visualisation.

[edips]

LandXML is the best file format for 2D/3D data. However it is commonly used for CAD softwares. It can be exported to GIS but I don't think it has attribute table. LandXML and CSV can be a good combination for 3D GIS.