Patent ID: 8847949

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for publishing replicated geographic data in a node tree for display in a three-dimensional environment, comprising: (a) ingesting instances by one or more computing devices, each instance including an instance location and a reference to a geographic model to be displayed at the instance location; (b) determining, by the one or more computing devices, levels of detail in the node tree for instances based at least on a size of a model referenced by the instances; (c) distributing, by the one or more computing devices, the instances to a set of nodes in the node tree at the corresponding levels of detail determined in (b); (d) determining, by the one or more computing devices, an ancestor node in the node tree for one or more nodes in the set of nodes; (e) generating, by the one or more computing devices, a collection to be referenced by the ancestor node in the node tree, the collection including geographic models referenced by the one or more nodes, wherein instances in the one or more nodes reference one or more models in the collection; and (f) publishing, by the one or more computing devices, the node tree with the collection and the instances, wherein the published node tree enables retrieval of models at relatively coarser levels of the node tree and retrieval of replicated instances at relatively finer levels of the node tree; wherein data associated with a first model includes one or more geometry items representing geometry for the first model each geometry item including an index of the first model in the corresponding collection and a maximum display distance for a corresponding level of detail represented by the first model.