Lukas Arzoumanidis | Search arXiv

arXiv2026

pykci: A Compact Urban Knowledge Graph for Semantic and Spatial Queries using LLMs

CityGML, the OGC standard for modeling, storage, and exchange of semantic 3D city models, describes urban objects with detailed semantics, geometry, and topology. Yet this richness is difficult to query directly: CityGML's XML encoding is designed for exchange rather than analysis, and relational mappings expose it through schemas requiring expert knowledge. We present pykci (Python Knowledge Graph for Cities), an open-source system that transforms CityGML 2.0 datasets into a compact urban knowledge graph in Neo4j and makes it queryable in natural language. The graph schema covers all thematic feature modules of CityGML 2.0 across all levels of detail and is spatially indexed with an R-tree for efficient geometric retrieval. A complete end-to-end Python pipeline ingests CityGML datasets into the knowledge graph, exports them to OGC 3D Tiles for interactive visualization, and supports lossless round-trip export of all content back to CityGML. For querying, the graph is paired with a large language model through a model-agnostic text-to-Cypher mechanism: the graph schema is supplied as context, and the model translates natural-language questions into Cypher queries executed against the graph. We evaluate both a locally running open-weight model, which keeps sensitive city data on-premise, and a state-of-the-art commercial model for the most demanding spatial and semantic queries. Answers are grounded in exact city data rather than the model's parametric memory, reducing hallucination and providing auditable provenance for every response. We demonstrate the system on open-government CityGML LoD2 datasets from Hamburg, Germany, including complex semantic and spatial queries such as identifying roof surfaces suitable for greening. pykci enables urban planners, GIS practitioners, and citizens to interact with semantic 3D city models without expertise in query languages and database schemas.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2026

SVI2LoD3: Agent-Driven Reconstruction of LoD3 Facade Openings in Semantic 3D City Models from Volunteered Street View Imagery using Large Language and Visual Models

This paper presents an end-to-end, agent-driven pipeline for the LoD3 reconstruction of facade openings in 3D city models, producing directly usable CityGML-conform outputs. In contrast to existing approaches that rely on supervised semantic segmentation and therefore require large amounts of manually annotated training data, the proposed method employs a zero-shot segmentation strategy. This substantially reduces the annotation effort while still achieving strong performance in our benchmark on the eTRIMS dataset. A further key contribution is the enforcement of correct partonomic hierarchies, thereby producing CityGML-conform LoD3 building models. Beyond the reconstruction pipeline itself, this work also introduces a novel evaluation metric for facade reconstruction, termed Facade Feature Distance (FFD). Unlike conventional metrics such as mIoU or FRDS, which assess similarity primarily through pixel-wise overlap, FFD measures distance in a high-level feature space derived from a vision transformer. In doing so, it captures both semantic correctness and architectural layout, providing a more suitable assessment of facade reconstruction quality. The proposed pipeline and evaluation strategy together offer a practical and scalable contribution toward the automated generation and analysis of semantically enriched 3D city models. The developed code is published at: https://github.com/hcu-cml/citydb-SVI2LoD3-ai.

cs.CV↗