The Platform

The Platform

User and tasks

The platform was developed for various cultural heritage professionals, from archaeologists, to curators and conservators. It can be used in a variety of ways to answer research questions or with a specific goal in mind. These objectives include the exploration and classification of a dataset, the study of style and of production techniques within or across collections and the understanding of archaeological context. Furthermore, the system can be used for a systematic enrichment of the metadata associated with the artefacts in the collections. The involved pipelines can be broken down to the following features: explore, group, compare, reassemble and enrich. Read more…

Structure and tools

The interface of the platform is divided in two clients: a web-client and a desktop-client. This division is the consequence of the intrinsic limitations of web-browsers to deal with high resolution 3D models in a fast and efficient way and the need to use the web for the GRAVITATE semantic search-engine. The latter is in fact largely based on ResearchSpace, a collaborative semantic web environment developed by the British Museum that works entirely from the web. The main purpose of the web-client is to explore and browse the database for objects of interest and to provide useful information on the pieces. The desktop-client on the other hand serves mainly for the manipulation and visualisation of high resolution 3D models. The two clients are synchronised through a clipboard, in which objects of interests can be stored and grouped by the user.