Documenting and sharing comparative analyses of 3D digital museum artifacts through semantic web annotations

Understanding the similarities, differences, and relationships between cultural heritage artifacts is critical for determining their significance and their provenance. It also provides valuable information for ensuring the long-term preservation of cultural heritage artifacts. Consequently, as more museums develop online three-dimensional (3D) collections, curators and scholars are demanding online tools that enable them to document and interpret variances and similarities between related 3D digital objects. This article describes a system that was developed to enable museum curators and/or scholars to document relationships between multiple 3D digital representations of museum objects using web-based annotation tools. The 3D Semantic Association (3DSA) system enables users to annotate relationships between multiple whole objects, parts of objects, or features on objects (surface features or volumetric segments). The annotations are stored on a server in an interoperable format that can be shared, discovered, browsed, and retrieved through a web browser interface. This approach not only improves scholars' capabilities to undertake cultural heritage research but also enables researchers to document, share, discuss, and compare alternative hypotheses about the relationships between artifacts