A Data Description Model for Cultural Heritage Hypermedia and Virtual Environments Authenticated by Archaeologists

In this paper we will show our data description model conceived for avoiding the risk of realizing misleading Virtual Heritage (VH) reconstructions and for making accessible in a standardized way the background research material that lies under a "VR cultural product". The basic idea is to face the problem of the lack of standards for documenting sources in order to realize not only nice fast models, but also historically accurate models, proposing a model conceived by an interdisciplinary tcam, that involves 3d modellers, computer scientists and archaeologists. Thanks to this kind of collaboration, it is possible to rely on a deep scientific knowledge of archaeological data both for their selection and representation as Hypermedia and Virtual Environments and for the authentication of interactive prototypes developed in order to access Cultural Heritage(CH) data through the Internet and the CINECA's Virtual Theatre. The proposed data model developed for our case study, the Ctrsu rlcl Cerlter~clrio in Pompeii, is based on an extension of the Dublin Core (DC) metadata standard in order to describe a hierarchical structure conceived for describing archaeological objects and their relationships with iconographic sources and digital reproductions.