Scientific Reference Model : defining standards, methodology and implementation of serious 3D models in Archaeology, Art and Architectural History

In object-oriented historical research the need to combine hypotheses and textual arguments with the critical analysis based on sources – such as floor plans, sections, perspectives, and photographs – has considerably benefited from the developments in Digital Humanities (Münster, 2022). The use of digital 3D models has overcome many limitations inherent to two-dimensional records. Since the early 1990s hypothetical 3D reconstructions have therefore increasingly become routine research tools and essential means of representation capable of offering new methods of investigation, enabling new insights into the object-related research. In terms of a holistic approach to the analysis and case studies, i.e. the enhanced ability to examine and explore (Favro, 2012) serious challenges remain regarding documentation, interoperability and long-term access to 3D-based research outputs. In this context, numerous initiatives and research projects have emerged with the common objective of systematising and rationalising the various problems identified by scholars. Such projects still tend to remain isolated, lacking a significant impact on the community of potential users. 3D research outputs are not widely applicable, due to the complex prototypes of the software architecture, difficult to apply in a broad sense. Furthermore, the ‘old’ problems still exist, i.e. the traditional approaches - which do not consider a 3D model as a scholarly result, but only an investigative tool - and the reluctance to share these results and the associated procedures. Therefore, an attempt is being made to define the development and evaluation of an applicable methodology for the hypothetical 3D historical reconstruction, based on a shared theoretical approach. The working method presented here reflects many years of engagement with source-based hypothetical 3D reconstruction of no longer extant or unrealised architecture for teaching and research. Our focus is therefore on a low-threshold, application-oriented method of the Scientific Reference Model (SRM) as a documented and published basic model. The structured SRM represents an important working and knowledge state, which clarifies the essential information about the object, its components, its credibility or extent of hypothesis and copyright. Such SRM is made available for further research, edits and refinement, as well as further derivatives (special applications). Thus SRM represents a findable referential result of a scholarly investigation of a material object that physically no longer exists

Future Research Challenges for a Computer-Based Interpretative 3D Reconstruction of Cultural Heritage - A German Community's View

The workgroup for Digital Reconstruction of the Digital Humanities in the German-speaking area association (Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum e.V.) was founded in 2014 as cross-disciplinary scientific society dealing with all aspects of digital reconstruction of cultural heritage and currently involves more than 40 German researchers. Moreover, the workgroup is dedicated to synchronise and foster methodological research for these topics. As one preliminary result a memorandum was created to name urgent research challenges and prospects in a condensed way and assemble a research agenda which could propose demands for further research and development activities within the next years. The version presented within this paper was originally created as a contribution to the so-called agenda development process initiated by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in 2014 and has been amended during a joint meeting of the digital reconstruction workgroup in November 2014

Enrichment and preservation of architectural knowledge

In the context of the EU FP7 DURAARK project (2013–2016), inter- disciplinary methods, technologies and tools have been researched and devel‐ oped, that support the Long Term Preservation of semantically enriched digital representations of built structures. The results of the research efforts include approaches of semi-automatically deriving building models from point cloud data sets acquired from laser scans and the integration and overlay of such represen‐ tations with explicit Building Information Models (BIM). We introduce novel ways for the further semantic enrichment of such hybrid building models with contextual data and vocabularies from external resources using Linked Data (LD) and the recognition relevant features and building components. A special focus of the research reported here lies on strategies and policies for their long term archival, information retrieval based on rich semantic metadata and the use of such archival systems in research and commercial scenarios. We introduce a set of prototypical, open-source tools implementing these features that have been integrated into a modular preservation framework called the “DURAARK Work‐ bench”