A Framework for Maintaining Provenance Information of Cultural Heritage 3D-models

The advances in 3D digitizing technology have found significant application in the Cultural Heritage domain. The systematic large-scale production of digital cultural objects, the diversity of the processes involved and the complexity of describing historical relationships among them imposes the need for innovative knowledge management to handle all the semantic information in order to monitor, manage and document the origins and derivation of digital products. Flexibility is also very important for the enrichment and sharing of the acquired knowledge. The latter can be exploited by all members of the Cultural Heritage scientific community who can take advantage of the recorded provenance information for evaluating the 3D representation, tracking reliability of production, detecting tolerance and accuracy in acquisition and processing phases, documenting digitization techniques, studying evidence of historic and cultural events. In this paper we present a framework that supports the documentation, archiving and dissemination of data and metadata of 3D digital cultural heritage objects, enhancing the OAIS approach by permitting the ingest of all the involved data, not only the final result, during a workflow progress.