Fondement de la modélisation conceptuelle des bases de données géospatiales 3D

For the last 15 years, designing 2D databases has benefited from new or extended formalisms proposed by the GIS research community. However, three-dimensional representations have been significantly more frequent in the recent years, especially in 3D computer graphics and in 3D GIS. In spite of this fact, there exist a lot of confusion in fundamental notions and there has been insofar no proposal for solutions aimed at facilitating the conceptual modeling of 3D geospatial databases as required for GIS applications. The first difficulty met when someone wants to design a database model for 3D applications may seem bizarre but is in fact very fundamental: the very definitions of « 3 » and of « D » ! This paper proposes fundamental notions and a solution to create conceptual models of geospatial databases for 3D applications: theoretical concepts, 3D extensions for UML, integration with Perceptory spatial and spatio-temporal PVL, simple and complex cases. MOTS CLÉS: définitions 3D, SIG 3D, base de données géospatiales, modélisation conceptuelle, UML 3D, PVL 3D, Perceptory.