Aljosa ZERJAL / Tina ZERJAL / Natasa KOLEGA
(Harpha sea, Koper, Slovenia)

Abstract:After finishing a 3D city model of the present historic town of Koper (Slovenia) using topographic and LIDAR data, as well as photographic material, the 3D/GIS team at Harpha sea d.o.o. has taken up the challenge of eventually building a 4D city model (the first phase is only the 3D historical model).The town of Koper has grown on an island near north-Adriatic coast. A larger settlement developed from Late Roman period onwards and in 13th century, under the rule of Serenissima (Venice), the island was already almost entirely covered with buildings and enclosed by city walls. The sight of the town has remained mainly unaltered till the 19th century. Only after the 1950s, its insular character has vanished, since it became part of the mainland.

The goal of the project was to visualize the towns historic appearance, particularly its insular character, as a 3D model. The map of Franziscean cadastre from year 1819 (scale 1:1440) was chosen as the basis for the model. It reproduces exactly all the ground plans of the buildings, streets, squares, yards, gardens, piers and the coastline at that time, and even the course of the city walls, gates and towers, which were still standing but not in use anymore. The heights of the buildings were reconstructed from written sources of the Franziscean cadastre, observations and scientific data on standing architecture, old depictions and from photographs taken in the beginning and first half of the 20th century. 15 % of building models were more accurately modeled with attached rectified photographs of facades.

The 3D city model of Koper is modeled with customized open source toolkit OpenSceneGraph (OSG), based on data stored in a PostGis database. The model can be viewed in a customized version of OSG Viewer (part of OSG) developed by our company.

The 3D city model of Koper is intended to be used for pedagogical activities in cultural heritage education and cultural tourism.

Keywords:
3D model, city, history, cultural heritage