Assessing the Value of Semantic Annotation Services for 3D Museum Artefacts

Increasing numbers of museums and cultural institutions are using 3D scanning techniques to preserve cultural artefacts as 3D digital models and to provide curators, scholars and the general public with a richer experience when accessing online exhibitions. However there are a number of challenges associated with the development, maintenance and curation of 3D digital collections. In particular, museums are keen to explore how they might exploit Web 2.0 social tagging services to harness community effort and knowledge. Existing 3D tagging services are limited in that they are designed for specific disciplines, are not Web-based and depend on proprietary software and formats. The majority also only support the attachment of tags/annotations to whole objects—not points, 3D surface regions or 3D segments. To fill this gap, we have developed the 3DSA (3D Semantic Annotation) system that enables users to attach tags and annotations to points, surface regions or segments of 3D digital artefacts. Moreover, by basing the 3DSA system on the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) data model, we enable annotations to be re-used, exchanged and shared as Linked Data across annotation clients and across different 3D and 2.5D digital representations of a single artefact. In addition, the provision of ontology-based tags facilitates further semantic annotation and reasoning across digital heritage collections. This paper describes the design and functionality of the 3DSA system and evaluates it in terms of its flexibility, extensibility, interoperability and usability by audiences with wide-ranging IT skills, computer capabilities and network speeds.