CityJSON (3D City Model)

CityJSON is a compact way of writing the same city model as CityGML, but in ordinary JSON instead of bulky XML. The same set of concepts (buildings, level of detail, attributes), only the file is many times smaller and is parsed by any language without special libraries. It is a recognized OGC community standard, not an amateur invention.

The format is chosen when a semantic 3D model is needed on the web, in scripts or in exchange between teams: to look at it in a browser viewer, to run it through Python, to put it into a repository, to hand it to colleagues without a heavy GIS stack.

The output is a single file: buildings at LOD1 detail are written as closed volumes extruded from OSM outlines. Vertices are stored as integers with millimeter precision through a scale factor and are deduplicated, so the file comes out noticeably lighter than the equivalent XML. The metadata records the coordinate system and the bounds of the model, and the buildings carry height, floor count and class.