Several efforts need to be undertaken to underpin the development of tools which are capable of recording, processing, analysing, manipulating and exploiting descriptions of 3D-artefacts which embody integrated descriptions of 3D-object semantics (metadata, provenance data). The approach will be the design of processing tools (following the successful experience of EPOCH’s MeshLab tool) together with the design of libraries offering data representation schemes and algorithms, which will be used in the development of other COFORM tools. Basically two ways exist to assign semantics to an acquired 3D dataset, namely by shape analysis (segmentation of the raw data into meaningful parts and pieces), or by establishing the correspondence to an informed reconstruction of the same scene. Both ways will be pursued in 3D-COFORM.
"Fitting a shape template to a real model."
We will develop tools for knowledge-aware segmentations, which may be geometry-driven or based on subshape matching or through the detection of (self-) similarities of the model (e.g. to detect repetitions and ornament patterns). At the technical level, we will investigate the relationships between ontological standards (METS, CIDOC-CRM), provenance data encoding and de-facto standard geometric representations (X3D, Collada), endorsing both 3D graphics and Digital Libraries perspectives and following the EDL emphasis on a Digital Library spanning a much wider spectrum of artefacts than the traditional text based sources.
