ART3MIS: Ray-Based Textual Annotation on 3D Cultural Objects

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2010

Increasing numbers of museums and cultural institutions are using 3D laser scanning techniques to preserve cultural artefacts as 3D digital models, that are then accessible to curators, scholars and the general public via Web interfaces to online galleries. Museums are finding the cost of providing metadata for such collections prohibitive and are keen to explore how they might exploit Web 2.0 social tagging and annotation services to capture community knowledge and enrich the contextual metadata associated with their collections. Although there exist some annotation services for 3D objects, they are designed for specific disciplines, not Web-based or depend on proprietary software and formats. The majority also only support the attachment of annotations to whole objects-not points, 3D surface regions or 3D segments. This paper describes the 3DSA (3D Semantic Annotation) system developed at the University of Queensland that enables users to attach annotations to 3D digital artefacts. The 3DSA system is based on a common interoperable annotation model (the Open Annotations Collaboration (OAC) model) and uses ontology-based tags to support further semantic annotation and reasoning. This common approach enables annotations to be re-used, migrated and shared-across annotation clients and across different 3D and 2.5D digital representations of the one cultural artifact. Such interoperability is essential if cultural institutions are to easily harness knowledge from a broad range of users, including curators, students and remote Indigenous communities, with different client capabilities.

Computer Graphics Forum

Annotation support in interactive systems is often considered a simple task by the CG community, since it entails the apparently easy selection of a region and to connect it with some information. The reality appears more complex. The scope of this paper is twofold: first, to review the status of this domain, discussing and characterizing several approaches proposed in literature to manage annotations over geometric models; second, to present in detail an innovative solution proposed and assessed in the framework of Cultural Heritage (CH) applications, called ClippingVolumes. At the annotation definition stage ClippingVolumes uses 3D data to characterize the annotation region; subsequently, annotations are visualized by adopting a two-pass rendering solution which uses stencil buffers, thus without introducing new geometric elements, changing the topology or duplicating geometry elements. It solves most of the issues that afflict the current state of the art, such as: fragmentation; annotation transfer to multiple representations; and enabling to annotate multi-resolution data encoding. The latter is a mandatory requirement to produce efficient web-based systems. We implemented and we fully tested this approach in the framework of a complex system that supports the documentation of CH restoration projects.

Springer eBooks, 2024

While 3D rendering of archaeological features in the field is becoming a standard documentary procedure, in the case of objects it remains less wellintegrated as a functional resource, when compared to conventional illustration and photography. This paper examines the current state of the art for 3D data workflows, as used in the study of material culture in archaeology. In doing so, we touch upon the historical-technological background of this mode of documentation and observe its current level of impact on what we may consider normal ways of interacting with archaeological assemblages. We underline how current data-management and production issues diminish potential interoperability across 3D model-making platforms and lead to an escalation in data-storage consumption.

Conference: UID, Congress of Unione Italiana per il DisegnoVolume: DIALOGHI DIALOGUES visioni e visualità visions and visuality

This study focuses on 3D acquisition and documentation procedures, innovating and implementing traditional survey methods to promote and increase the efficacy of the historical and archaeological heritage fruition. Especially within museum itineraries, modern digital technologies, if consistently applied, can promote a better interpretative reading, implementing the knowledge of scholars. Moreover, in coherence with the Horizon Europe “Cultural Heritage” area of intervention, for a new future inextricably linked to the history of Cultural Heritage, it is essential to experiment approaches that favor innovative mechanisms of fruition and promotion of works of art, based on the idea that the user is an active part of the experiential path. The study presents some acquisition experiences on different archaeological artifacts collected at the National Archaeological Museum of Crotone, applying integrated technologies and defining a rigorous methodological process of analysis and control.

EUROGRAPHICS Workshop on Graphics and Cultural Heritage (2014) -- R. Klein and P. Santos (Editors)

Philological research on ancient cuneiform texts with the goal of analyzing and reconstructing manuscripts from a large quantity of available unsorted tablet fragments is a time consuming task. As the number of tablet fragments and the number of signs on the fragments both exceed values which can be handled by means of conventional manual research methods in a reasonable amount of time, the use of computer aided research methods is an obvious choice. In this paper, we present a novel unified approach for integrating methods of computer graphics into the process of analyzing and joining cuneiform tablet fragments. We will cover a selection of essential research scenarios and identify aspects where those methods can be applied to enhance and extend traditional philological research processes or even help to access formerly unavailable layers of information. This is achieved by integrating methods for visualization, interactive 3D script feature extraction, script analysis, virtual fragment joining and intuitive measurement and annotation tools in our fast and easy to use software framework CuneiformAnalyser, designed for large data sets. Unlike other approaches, our solution integrates for the first time methods to support every aspect of the manuscript analysis and reconstruction process in a single system.

In this paper we investigate many of the various storage, portability and interoperability issues arising among archaeologists and cultural heritage people when dealing with 3D technologies. On the one side, the available digital repositories look often unable to guarantee affordable features in the management of 3D models and their metadata; on the other side the nature of most of the available data format for 3D encoding seem to be not satisfactory for the necessary portability required nowadays by 3D information across different systems. We propose a set of possible solutions to show how integration can be achieved through the use of well known and wide accepted standards for data encoding and data storage. Using a set of 3D models acquired during various archaeological campaigns and a number of open source tools, we have implemented a straightforward encoding process to generate meaningful semantic data and metadata. We will also present the interoperability process carried out to integrate the encoded 3D models and the geographic features produced by the archaeologists. Finally we will report the preliminary (rather encouraging) development of a semantic enabled and persistent digital repository, where 3D models (but also any kind of digital data and metadata) can easily be stored, retrieved and shared with the content of other digital archives.

Ancient Egypt, New Technology The Present and Future of Computer Visualization, Virtual Reality and Other Digital Humanities in Egyptology, 2023

3D visualizations of heritage objects such as ancient Egyptian coffins can be better used for general and specialistic studies if they also provide annotations. This paper presents the system of annotations developed for the "Book of the Dead in 3D Project," which applies photogrammetry and digital annotations to coffins and sarcophagi produced in the 1st millennium bce. The annotated models of the project include the transcription, translation and transliteration of the magical texts inscribed on the coffins, which can be interactively read by the user while navigating the 3D model.

2018

With the advent of artificial intelligence and natural user interfaces, the need for multimedia material that can be semantically interpreted in real time becomes critical. In the field of 3D architectural survey, a significant amount of research has been conducted to allow domain experts represent semantic data while keeping spatial references. Such data becomes valuable for natural user interfaces designed to let non-expert users obtain information about architectural heritage. In this paper, we present the architectural data collection and annotation procedure adopted in the Cultural Heritage Orienting Multimodal Experiences (CHROME) project. This procedure aims at providing conversational agents with fast access to fine-detailed semantic data linked to the available 3D models. We will discuss how this will make it possible to support multimodal user interaction and generate cultural heritage presentations.

2022