I3S, an OGC 3D Streaming Standard Enabling Geospatial Interoperability and Composability

Indexed 3D Scene Layers (I3S), an OGC Community Standard for streaming and storing massive amounts of geospatial content has been rapidly evolving to capture new use cases and techniques to advance geospatial visualization and analysis. As an OGC Community Standard, I3S has been evolving over the last 4 years adopting new use cases and capability. The current version of OGC I3S 1.3 adopted in Dec. 2022 enables efficient transmission of various 3D geospatial data types including discrete 3D objects with attributes, integrated surface meshes and point cloud data covering vast geographic areas as well as highly detailed BIM (Building Information Model) content, to web browsers, mobile apps and desktop.

As an open standard, I3S has been embraced by the Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) Community for streaming massive 3D geospatial content. Enabling composition of 3d geospatial content covering different disciplines and use cases is the strength of I3S. In this paper, we’ll describe and demonstrate, including via applicable code snippets and sandcastles, I3S consumption in popular web-based 3D visualization applications such as loaders.gl and CesiumJS.