Conceptual approach of information rich 3D model about the Terezín Memorial

Abstract

Looking at the concept of the virtual model of Terezín Memorial, the model consists of two main parts: the geometric 3D model which depicts the place and the lexical base of data which describes the history of Terezín, mainly during the II. World War.Taking a closer look, the heterogeneous nature of existing both analogue and digital documents about the history leads to use a content management system (CMS). CMS is used, together with a relational database, for the lexical data. Each document in CMS has its unique identifier, identifier of a place to which is referred to and two dates referring to a time period. The spatial part of the Terezín model consists of detailed models of all historically valuable buildings and constructions. These models are complemented with less detailed models of the rest of buildings and constructions in the Terezín town.Both lexical and spatial part of the virtual model is filled up with large amount of data. Therefore it is crucial to build such a method of (both lexical and spatial) data selection, which is fast and serve relevant information to the user. Whereas well known one dimensional data indexes can be used for descriptive data, situation is a bit more complex in 3D, where common geographic (two dimensional) data indexes cannot be used. In 3D, size of bounding box (BB) of each potentially portrayed object is calculated, based on the observer position, its view direction and the distance from the object. When the size of BB of each object is calculated, different level of detail (LOD) of each object can be displayed. Different LODs are used also in two dimensional maps, where they are used for creation of a scale dependent map, but there is again principal difference between 2D and 3D. While in 2D always just one LOD at a time is portrayed in the map, objects closer to the observer are displayed in higher detail then farther ones in 3D. It leads to a situation, where objects are displayed in different LODs in one 3D scene. This issue poses a major challenge to a creation of a multi-scale 3D model, because different LODs have to share major shape (at least footprints and heights). Moreover the virtual model has to be also time aware, therefore each piece of information in the database has to have a time period for which it is valid.