Urban Analytics Lab

Geospatial and 3D urban modelling research group at the National University of Singapore

We are a new interdepartmental multidisciplinary research group focusing on urban data analysis, geographic data science, and 3D city modelling at the National University of Singapore (NUS), the #1 university in Asia and world’s #11 (QS 2021).

Our mission is to leverage on spatially enabled data for urban applications, catalyse the development of geospatial infrastructure and technology in the context of smart cities, and make sense of big geospatial data and digital twins in the built environment to achieve informed decisions.

The research group is led by Dr Filip Biljecki, presidential young professor at the NUS School of Design and Environment.

We are involved in several international collaborations such as the World Economic Forum (WEF), the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS), and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). On the national level, we have collaborations with Singapore Government agencies, other research groups, and companies.

You are welcome to follow our work through Twitter and our blog.

Our interests and key words: Geographical Information Science (GIS), geospatial machine learning, geographic data science, spatial data infrastructure (SDI), 3D city modelling / 3D GIS (some people also call them digital twins), 3D urban analytics, spatial data quality and standardisation (CityJSON, CityGML), Volunteered geoinformation (VGI) and OpenStreetMap (OSM), Building Information modelling (BIM), Geospatial data visualisation, 3D underground data modelling, and 3D cadastre.

Lately

Updates from our Lab

Feel free to follow us on Twitter or through our RSS feed.

New paper: 3D city models for urban farming site identification in buildings

A novel application of 3D geoinformation, published in Computers, Environment and Urban Systems
2021-01-11 3 min read

OGC seeks public comment on new CityJSON Community Standard

CityJSON offers an easy-to-use alternative to the GML encoding of CityGML 2.0 for the storage and exchange of 3D city models
2021-01-09 3 min read

Two new papers: Reference study of IFC/CityGML software support

The GeoBIM benchmark is concluded with two papers published back-to-back in Transactions in GIS
2021-01-04 4 min read

The new building of our school is the first one in SE Asia to achieve the stringent Zero Energy Certification

Recognition by the prestigious International Living Future Institute
2020-12-02 1 min read

New paper: Extending CityGML for IFC-sourced 3D city models

Development of an application domain extension published in Automation in Construction
2020-11-16 2 min read

Meet our junior members

The Lab warmly welcomes new student researchers
2020-11-03 3 min read

Recent activities of the Lab

After we’ve enjoyed taking part in the State of the Map, IACAD, and 3D GeoInfo, the ongoing work of the Lab was presented at other venues.
2020-10-28 1 min read

New report: Smart at Scale: Cities to Watch (25 Case Studies)

We contributed to the latest report of the World Economic Forum focusing on successful pilot projects that scaled
2020-10-27 1 min read

Guest lecture by Jinal Foflia

We are very pleased that Ms Jinal Foflia, Senior Program Manager – Geo at Grab has visited us to give a guest lecture as part of our module Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Cartography.
2020-10-17 1 min read

The PI of the Lab elected co-chair of the Open Geospatial Consortium 3DIM DWG

3D Information Modelling Domain Working Group
2020-09-23 1 min read

New paper: How might an LoD Logic Framework Help to Bridge the 3D Cadastre Research-to-Practice Gap?

FIG Working Week 2020. A Proposal for a Level of Implementation Framework
2020-09-15 2 min read

New paper: Tools for BIM-GIS Integration (IFC Georeferencing and Conversions): Results from the GeoBIM Benchmark 2019

A new collaborative paper in which we have been involved has been published
2020-09-14 3 min read

Participation at the 3D GeoInfo 2020 conference

3D GeoInfo is a key conference in the 3D GIS community
2020-09-13 1 min read

New paper: Exploration of open data in Southeast Asia to generate 3D building models

This article investigates the current status of generating 3D building models across 11 countries in Southeast Asia from publicly available data, primarily volunteered geoinformation (OpenStreetMap)
2020-09-12 2 min read

New paper: Visualising detailed CityGML and ADE at the building scale

There is an increasing activity in developing workflows and implementations to convert BIM data into CityGML. However, there are still not many platforms that are suitable to view and interact with the detailed information stored as a result of such conversions, especially if an Application Domain Extension (ADE) is involved to support additional information
2020-09-11 2 min read
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What we do

And how we do it

Reusable, Sharable, and Transferable Smart Data Platform for Collaborative Development of Data-driven Smart Cities

Novel technologies to connect smart cities

Large-scale 3D geospatial data for urban analytics

Creating country-wide 3D city models using artificial intelligence

3D cadastre

Collaboration with Prof Jantien Stoter (TU Delft) and Dr Serene Ho (RMIT University).

BIM-GIS interoperability

Integration of Building Information Modelling (BIM) and GIS

Urban Modelling and Smart Cities

Harnessing geographic information in the urban context.

Big Data in Real Estate

Leveraging urban analytics in real estate

GeoBIM Benchmark

Reference study on software support for open standards of city and building models

Opportunities

Openings, scholarships, and fellowships

Please check the opportunities page for more information how to join us.

Teaching

Our education activities

We are involved in teaching master courses and supervising dissertations. Are you looking for a thesis topic? Please check the teaching page for more information.

Recent publications

Our 15 latest papers. Enjoy

All our papers are available here.

3D city models for urban farming site identification in buildings

Studies have suggested that there is farming potential in urban residential buildings. However, these studies are limited in scope, …
PDF Project DOI

Reference study of IFC software support: The GeoBIM benchmark 2019---Part I

Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), the buildingSMART open standard for BIM, is underused with respect to its promising potential, since, according to the experience of practitioners and researchers working with BIM, issues in the standard’s implementation and use prevent its effective use.
PDF Project DOI

Reference study of CityGML software support: The GeoBIM benchmark 2019---Part II

OGC CityGML is an open standard for 3D city models intended to foster interoperability and support various applications. However, through our practical experience and discussions with practitioners, we have noticed several problems related to the implementation of the standard and the use of standardized data.
PDF Project DOI

Extending CityGML for IFC-sourced 3D city models

Differences in the scope and intent of the contrasting IFC and CityGML data formats entail that converting the former to the latter results in loss of information.
PDF Project DOI

Smart at Scale: Cities to Watch - 25 Case Studies

The World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Cities and Urbanization has leveraged its knowledge, networks and the public to identify 25 leading smart city projects that have successfully moved beyond the pilot stage.
PDF

Exploration of open data in Southeast Asia to generate 3D building models

This article investigates the current status of generating 3D building models across 11 countries in Southeast Asia from publicly available data, primarily volunteered geoinformation (OpenStreetMap).
PDF Project DOI

Visualising detailed CityGML and ADE at the building scale

There is an increasing activity in developing workflows and implementations to convert BIM data into CityGML. However, there are still not many platforms that are suitable to view and interact with the detailed information stored as a result of such conversions, especially if an Application Domain Extension (ADE) is involved to support additional information.
PDF Project DOI

GeoBIM benchmark -- ISPRS Scientific initiative 2019 -- Final report

In both research and practice, data interoperability is considered essential to support a rising number of applications that need data from different domains.
PDF Project

The ISPRS-EuroSDR GeoBIM benchmark 2019

Standardised data formats and data models are essential for data integration and interoperability, which in turn adds value to data by allowing its reuse in multiple contexts.
PDF Project Project DOI

Assessing the quality of OpenStreetMap building data in Singapore

As OpenStreetMap is getting increasingly popular due to its open-license nature and collaborative aspect, its data quality is …
PDF Project

Tools for BIM-GIS Integration (IFC Georeferencing and Conversions): Results from the GeoBIM Benchmark 2019

Update 2020-09-26: The paper was featured as the cover story of the September 2020 issue of IJGI! The integration of 3D city models with Building Information Models (BIM), coined as GeoBIM, facilitates improved data support to several applications, eg, 3D map updates, building permits issuing, detailed city analysis, infrastructure design, context-based building design, to name a few.
PDF Project Project DOI

Assessing global OpenStreetMap building completeness to generate large-scale 3D city models

PDF Project DOI

ICDAR'20: Intelligent Cross-Data Analysis and Retrieval

The First International Workshop on “Intelligence Cross-Data Analytics and Retrieval” (ICDAR’20) welcomes any theoretical and practical works on intelligence cross-data analytics and retrieval to bring the smart-sustainable society to human beings.
PDF DOI

How might an LoD Logic Framework Help to Bridge the 3D Cadastre Research-to-Practice Gap? A Proposal for a Level of Implementation Framework

During the past decade, hundreds of research papers have been published on the challenge of registering multi-level properties in land …
PDF Project

An application-driven LOD modeling paradigm for 3D building models

The level of detail (LOD) concept for 3D building models, which indicates the degree of closeness between a model and its real-world …
PDF Project DOI
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