Towards complete digital twins in cultural heritage with ART3mis 3D artifacts annotator

TL;DR

This paper presents ART3mis, a web-based tool for annotating 3D cultural heritage artifacts, enabling metadata attachment and communication, designed for non-technical users and ensuring interoperability with existing standards.

Contribution

It introduces a general-purpose, user-friendly annotation platform for 3D artifacts that supports interoperability and is tailored for cultural heritage professionals.

Findings

Supports W3C Web Annotation Data Model

Enables easy segmentation and annotation of 3D artifacts

Facilitates communication and reuse of annotations

Abstract

Archaeologists, as well as specialists and practitioners in cultural heritage, require applications with additional functions, such as the annotation and attachment of metadata to specific regions of the 3D digital artifacts, to go beyond the simplistic three-dimensional (3D) visualization. Different strategies addressed this issue, most of which are excellent in their particular area of application, but their capacity is limited to their design's purpose; they lack generalization and interoperability. This paper introduces ART3mis, a general-purpose, user-friendly, feature-rich, interactive web-based textual annotation tool for 3D objects. Moreover, it enables the communication, distribution, and reuse of information as it complies with the W3C Web Annotation Data Model. It is primarily designed to help cultural heritage conservators, restorers, and curators who lack technical expertise in 3D imaging and graphics, handle, segment, and annotate 3D digital replicas of artifacts with ease.