Archaeology & Cultural Heritage AWG
Manolis Vavalis
Marios Pitikakis
CERETETH

3D and knowledge in A&CH
A&CH domain is characterized by an increasing
volume of 3D digital content
A large part of the European CH exists in digital
collections (e.g. virtual museums, digital libraries, scientific
repositories)
3D models and virtual spaces have huge
potential for enhancing the way people
interact with museum collections and structured e-
learning environments
attempt to answer challenging research questions.

Indicative Open Problems
A&CH 3D digital libraries are becoming more
and more demanding
management, preservation, delivery mechanisms…
3D A&CH content often is
hard to access and interpret
held in multiple internal systems
with non-standard schemas and descriptions.
The unavoidable manual annotation of explicit
semantics is not a practical approach
especially when the number of resources is
expected to grow fast.

Current practices in Knowledge Management
Digital collections are becoming more and more
demanding in terms of management,
preservation, and delivery mechanisms.
Standards for interoperability
Dublin Core metadata
CIDOC-CRM
MPEG-7
Standards for data exchange
X3D, VRML
COLLADA

Geometry & Knowledge Synergies:
Search or Match
Perform content- and context-based
(semantic) searching to retrieve 3D models,
using any combination of text, 3D objects and
ontology classifications.
use/share in a simple way the scientific
heritage
partial matching and reconstruction of
missing pieces

Geometry & Knowledge Synergies:
Archaeology and Geosciences
Archaeology Discovery & Integration with
Geosciences
Bring disparate datasets through a common
reasoning system
Develop conceptual workflows
Reason on, and validate theoretical scenarios

Geometry & Knowledge Synergies:
Virtual Reality Simulations
Model architecture
(theaters, mosques,
monuments, …)
Use behavioral
animation techniques to
model the movement,
rituals, celebrations,
and practices of people

Geometry & Knowledge Synergies:
Automatic Identification
The model input is
processed for automated
annotation Automated
annotation
A generic ontology is
available
Instances of
Generic
The semantic analyzer ontology
semantic
information
combines the results of
the annotations and GUI
Semantic
Analyzer
the ontology to input it
into the inference module
Instantiated
Inference
ontology

Contacts and Key Players
National Museum of Ethnology, Netherlands
STARC - Cyprus Institute, Cyprus
Cultural Technologies, Jordan
MellaniuM, UK
Hellenic World Foundation, Greece
Alinari, Italy
Arkaia SRL, Italy
PUCRS University, Brazil
Sabanci University - Computer Graphics Lab, Turkey
Centro Interdipartimentale di Servizi di Archeologia – University of Naples
L’Orientale, Italy
High Performance Information Systems Lab - University of Patras, Greece
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Germany
European Virtual Engineering Technological Centre-EUVE, Spain
Dept. of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology - University of
Thessaly, Greece
BK s.r.l, Italy
Giunti Labs S.r.l., Italy

Contacts and Key Players
Characteristics
Purpose of use
restoration, reconstruction, visualization, e-learning
Variety of AWG members
Museums, Companies, Universities, Research Institutes
Application areas
Archaeological investigations, Museum displays,
Education, Serious Games
Simulation & reconstruction of ancient processes / environments
Virtual reality applications / Virtual cinema

Connected to the other FocusK3D AWGs:
Can the “Large Arch” be re-erected?
Dismantled
Travertine
Sculpture
Fiber glass
Model
Finite
Element
Analysis
Solid Model
Simulations

Connected to the other FocusK3D AWGs:
Serious Games and A&CH

Scenarios in Archaeology & Cultural Heritage
“How do you evaluate a CH digital artifact?”
Existing and emerging electronic scholarly
publication services include:
The Archaeology Data Service, Internet
Archaeology, Digital Humanities Quarterly ,
Serving and Archiving Virtual Environment
How do you peer review a CH shape?
in a fair and undisputed manner?
from a subjective view point?
using a purely scientific methodology?

Scenarios in Archaeology & Cultural Heritage
interactions with
precious artifacts
without risk of
damage
provide documentation in case of loss or
damage
used for educational purposes, such as virtual
museums/exhibits, virtual tourism and 3D
visualization of city buildings and monuments.

Conclusions
A Multi-disciplinary Effort
Clearly define the
interfaces between
disciplines
Identify and map
existing related work in
each discipline
An “Information System”
component is needed
Semantic Integration
& Interoperability