A web repository for geo-located 3D digital cultural heritage models
Introduction
In the last years, 3D digital documentation of tangible cultural heritage (CH) received a great deal of attention. With recent advances in remote-sensing technologies and imaging devices, CH professionals now equipped with powerful 3D surveying tools and 3D modelling software applications to create an impressive 3D replica of CH sites and objects (Remondino, 2011; Remondino and Cowley, 2011; Yastikli, 2007). These developments, in turn, have generated in the last decade a great deal of large-scale and individual 3D CH digitization projects across the globe. A “CyArk”1 project is one of the highly relevant examples, which has now created 3D digital models of over 200 different CH sites on all seven continents. Another apt example is “3D-ICONS”, a European project funded by the European Commission, which has massively digitized Europe’s archaeological and historical buildings in a 3D form in order to contribute 3D content to the “Europeana”2 portal (Barsanti and Guidi, 2013; D’Andrea et al., 2012).
Alongside the advances in 3D modelling technologies, in recent years web-based CH repositories have started emerging for long-term archiving and dissemination of 3D digital CH models. Long-term archiving of 3D CH models is of paramount importance to ensure digital conservation of CH, while dissemination of CH is essential to reach the wider audience possible. These concepts are also underlined by international CH agencies such as The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),3 International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS).4 There is also a CH agency namely The International Committee for Documentation of Cultural Heritage (CIPA), which advises on surveying methods for CH monuments and sites (Patias, 2007). Furthermore, 3D digital CH models are now not only utilized for plain visualization but also for different use cases in education, research, tourism, virtual and augmented reality among others (Michela and Chiara Eva, 2018; Rahaman et al., 2019; Scopigno et al., 2011). Regarding web-based repositories for 3D digital CH models, there have been some innovative projects in the CH domain in the last decade. 3D-COFORM is among those projects, which offers an integrated repository system. It can work as a web repository for distributed institutions to store, manipulate and export 3D digital CH models, which can be suitable for a CH institution with several sub-institutions or sub-divisions in different locations (Doerr et al., 2010). Another well-known platform for CH institutions is OMEKA. It is a purpose-built platform for CH institutions that can be downloaded and can work as a web repository. This platform offers a 3D storage and 3D visualization features.5 On the other hand, there are some successful commercial repositories available on the Web such as Sketchfab, TurboSquid, which can be used to publish, to store and to visualize 3D CH models over the Web. Although there are some downloadable web repositories and commercial repositories on the Web, 3D CH models are difficult to find, use and re-use. In fact, Champion and Rahaman (2019) surveyed 14 proceedings of leading digital heritage events and conferences by The International Society for Virtual Systems and Multimedia (VSMM), Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA), International Committee of Architectural Photogrammetry (CIPA), The European Mediterranean Conferences (EuroMed), and The Digital Heritage International Congress, to examine accessibility of 3D models in published scholarly research articles, from 2012 to 2017. According to their findings, out of 1483 examined conference articles only 17.9% or 264 articles incorporated 3D models or images of 3D models. Strikingly, only 9 articles had accessible 3D content. Hence, CH professionals, CH organizations and CH domain in general, need more projects and easy-to-implement methodologies to build a web repository for long-term storage and dissemination of 3D digital CH models. Moreover, in most cases, 3D digital CH models incorporate spatial information such as geolocation. This article aims to present a web repository, and a reusable and extendable methodology to encourage the development of web repositories for geo-located 3D CH models. Moreover, unlike many previous related projects which developed the web repositories from the ground up, the web repository built using this methodology is based on free and open-source, easy-to-implement content management system namely KeystoneJS and other associated frameworks, which are reusable and completely extendable. This allows to accelerate and ease the development process and requires less technical and programming skills, which CH professionals and CH organizations can take advantage of. While this methodology is presented for the CH domain professionals in mind, in the long term it can be employed and extended for use in a wide range of domains such as archaeology, engineering, geographic information systems, etc.
The contributions of this article to the CH domain are as follows:
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A new methodology, to build a web repository for 3D digital CH models based on open-source, database-driven, easy-to-implement content management system namely KeystoneJS and other associated frameworks, which integrates maps, 3D CH models, and geospatial data such as geolocation.
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This methodology and the web repository can be implemented in CH institutions such as museums, galleries, archives to facilitate storage and visualization of 3D CH models and relating information. Since a 3D visualization can be a very close replica of the reality, it can help to arouse interest in the CH organization, for instance into a museum. Thereby, it can help to promote national and international tourism.
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This methodology and the web repository extend the existing body of knowledge and expertise for building web repositories for 3D models and help to tackle the challenges associated with integrating geospatial data and maps with 3D models.
The concepts such as 3D surveying and 3D modelling techniques, metadata, efficient search and retrieval of big cultural heritage data, 3D web-GIS and 3D analysis are out of the scope of this article.
The remainder of the article is organized as follows: Section 2 outlines some previous related work. Section 3 provides an overview of the background literature related to 3D visualization on the Web, 3D frameworks, 3D file formats, and web content management systems. Section 4 presents a methodology used to develop the web repository followed by a results and discussion part in Section 5. Section 6 provides a conclusion and planned future work.
Section snippets
Related work
In recent years there have been a few projects related to the development of a web repository for 3D CH models. The next paragraphs summarize some of these projects and provide an overview including the purpose of each project and employed technologies such as server-side programming language, 3D visualization framework, and database management system.
A project by Dhonju et al. (2018) developed a prototype termed “Share Our Cultural Heritage” (SOCH), which offers a web-based as well as a
3D visualization on the web
The World Wide Web has now become a primary medium for sharing information and data, which can display data in different forms including in a 3D form. These days, 3D visualization on the Web is not a new topic. From the early 1990s engineers started working on 3D visualization technologies on the Web. In 1994 the VRML consortium released a “Virtual Reality Modelling Language”, also known as “Virtual Reality Markup Language” (VRML), file format, which was designed to represent 3D interactive
Methodology
The next section describes the system architecture, which facilitated the web repository. Afterwards, employed 3D digital models are outlined, which have been used to test the web repository including some background information about each place and technical characteristics of the 3D models.
Results and discussion
As mentioned in the previous section, the user interface of the web repository has been developed using a Bootstrap toolkit, OpenLayers mapping library, and jQuery. The user interface is illustrated in Fig. 3, which has a base-map with clickable red pinpoints on top of it. These red pinpoints represent CH places and hold CH place related information such as a name, short description, and license information. In the web repository, CH places can be created by the administrator using the back-end
Conclusion and future work
3D surveying tools and techniques now allow CH professionals to 3D digitize tangible CH ranging from the smallest CH artifact to the largest CH building. This rapid evolution in technology has significantly advanced the conservation of CH in a digital form. However, the lifetime of 3D CH models is short, especially those which resulted from the individual CH research projects. According to the survey findings of Champion and Rahaman (2019), who looked at 1483 digital heritage articles published
Declaration of competing interest
I, Ikrom Nishanbaev, declare that there is no conflict of interest.
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