Paper 268 1 REPRESENTATIONS BUILD FROM A TRUE GEOGRAPHIC DATABASE Lars BODUM Associate Professor Centre for 3D GeoInformation Aalborg University Niels Jernes Vej 14 DK-9220 Aalborg Denmark Tel: +45 96358078 Fax: +45 98152444 E-mail: lbo@3dgi.dk Abstract: The development of a system for geovisualization under the Centre for 3D GeoInformation (3DGI) at Aalborg University, Denmark, has exposed the need for a rethinking of the representation of virtual environments. The system GRIFINOR, developed at 3DGI, Aalborg University, DK, is capable of creating this object-orientation and furthermore does this on top of a true Geographic database. A true Geographic database can be characterized as a database that can cover the whole world in 3d and with a spatial reference given by geographic coordinates. Build on top of this is a customised viewer, based on the Xith (Java) scenegraph. The viewer reads the objects directly from the database and solves the question about Level-of-Detail on buildings, orientation in relation to terrain and rendering of the model. All this is done in something very close to real-time. This paper will discuss different possibilities for representation of the objects from a geovisualization aspect. Keywords: 3D geovisualization, virtual environments, object-orientation, spatial indexing, global index.