Cultural Heritage Markup Language – How to record and preserve 3D assets of digital reconstruction

Piotr KUROCZYŃSKI¹ / Oliver HAUCK²
(¹Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, Marburg, Germany / ²Institute for Space Representation, Frankfurt/Main, Germany)

Keywords: 3D digital reconstruction, architecture, documentation standards

Abstract:
The lecture presents the on-going project “Virtual reconstructions in transnational research environments – The web portal ‘Palaces and Parks in former East Prussia’“ – Funded by the Leibniz Association from 2013 till 2016.
Within the multinational (Germany, Poland and Russia) and interdisciplinary project (art historians, historians, architects, geodesics and informatics) we design a virtual research environment based on the interactive 3D models of the baroque palaces linked with a semantic data model.
The project examines the methodology of the 3D-Computer-Reconstruction of Cultural Heritage according to the unsolved problems of certification, classification, annotation and visualization, in particular within the discipline of digital reconstruction of architecture, interior design and interior decoration. Our approach affects the overall process chain with a focus on the development of the “Cultural Heritage Markup Language” (CHML), a bracket to integrate diverse information (para- and metadata), including XML-inline description of the geometry, material, light and camera settings.
The project preliminary results introduce the appropriate acquisition, analysing and interpreting of data for digital reconstruction purposes. In addition, the project deals with 3D documentation of Cultural Heritage, semantical modeling, data management, to the point of „virtual museum“ and new forms of interactive presentations within cutting-edge solutions for WebGL. It shows the integration between survey, geometric interpretation and visual representation of generated knowledge in semantic web.