[HOT] 3d buildings showing structural integrity?

[Chris Blow]

Hello,

I wonder (in genuine ignorance again as always) has anyone talked about
using 3D building mapping to visually indicate a building's structural
integrity? For example, texturing a building wall to indicate if it is tile
vs. tin vs. thatch?

I see HOT is sometimes doing collection of this kind of structural data but
I think it is not visualized because, basically, the icons don't have
enough fidelity. Basemap colors and textures wouldn't make sense given that
the data is building by building.

Last year I thought it would be useful to make composite icons (eg, stacked
SVG shapes) to illustrate this but basically they came out too big to show
the details, and we didn't actually have this level of data in my case.
(For example: building:roof=tin would generate a special tin icon
composited on top of a basic building icon.)

Anyway today I saw this beautiful map from Bill Morris:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/65259390@N08/7890044118/  — This is some kind
of isometric faux-3d (right?) but in conversation it was suggested by
@OSMBuildings that WebGL rendering could handle proper 3d and textures in
the future.

Here's a wiki page that has plans to distinguish among a basic taxonomy of
building roof types, and it seems this could be extended to included
various stages of damage or insecurity:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Simple_3D_Buildings#Roof

So it seems if we were to map our neighborhood and indicate that some
buildings are reinforced concrete, and some have bad roofing, etc, it would
eventually be possible to actually see this clearly in the representation
of the building. I think this would be valuable for disaster prep
discussions.

I would appreciate any pointers on this line of thinking.

Chris Blow
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