A web repository for geo-located 3D digital cultural heritage models

Abstract

Recent advances in 3D surveying and web technologies have made a significant contribution to the digital conservation and dissemination of cultural heritage. 3D cultural heritage models are now a critical component in the cultural heritage conservation, which are also employed for other use cases in education, research, tourism, virtual and augmented reality. The World Wide Web is used as a primary medium for dissemination of 3D cultural heritage models, while databases including databases of web repositories for long-term archiving. This article aims to report a new methodology and a web repository to integrate maps, 3D models, and geospatial data such as geolocation. It can, therefore, be utilized for long-term archiving and visualization of geo-located 3D digital cultural heritage models on the Web. 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. It can, thereby, help cultural heritage organizations and cultural heritage professionals facilitate the rapid development of web repositories for geo-located 3D digital cultural heritage models, which can also be further extended per project requirements. While this methodology is presented for the cultural heritage domain in mind, in the long term it can be employed and extended for use in a wide range of domains such as archaeology, engineering, and geographic information systems (GIS) among others.