We All Live in a Virtual Submarine

Our seas and oceans hide a plethora of archaeological sites such as ancient shipwrecks that, over time, are being destroyed through activities such as deepwater trawling and treasure hunting. In 2006, a multidisciplinary team of 11 European institutions established the Venus (Virtual Exploration of Underwater Sites) consortium to make underwater sites more accessible by generating thorough, exhaustive 3D records for virtual exploration

Un Système d’Information 3D pour l’archéologie du bâti : Showback. Le cas de Montreal (Shawbak, Jordanie)

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Integration of Heterogeneous Cultural Heritage Data in a Web-based <br />Information System: A Case Study from Vianden Castle, Luxembourg

ISBN 978-963-8046-90-1International audienceThe project presented here proposes the first implementation of a Web-based Information System for the conservation, handling, and use of site data. The case study is the castle of Vianden in Luxembourg, on which considerable archaeological data have accumulated over the years. There is a recognized need in archaeology for a tool that will allow for fast, effective, and flexible exploratory analysis of data, especially at spatial and temporal levels. We have developed such an Information System with maximal portability by using Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) for data exchange. Our system consists of several interfaces permitting different types of access to heterogeneous information. We propose a description of the data in textual interfaces along with images, and dynamic links to this data through interactive 2D and 3D representations. The 2D images, photos, or vectors are generated in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), while 3D models are generated in X3

A web information system for the management and the dissemination of Cultural Heritage data.

Safeguarding and exploiting Cultural Heritage induce the production of numerous and heterogeneous data. The management of these data is an essential task for the use and the diffusion of the information gathered on the field. Previously, the data handling was a hand-made task done thanks to efficient and experienced methods. Until the growth of computer science, other methods have been carried out for the digital preservation and treatment of Cultural Heritage information. The development of computerized data management systems to store and make use of archaeological datasets is then a significant task nowadays. Especially for sites that have been excavated and worked without computerized means, it is now necessary to put all the data produced onto computer. This allows preservation of the information digitally (in addition with the paper documents) and offers new exploitation possibilities, like the immediate connection of different kinds of data for analyses, or the digital documentation of the site for its improvement. Geographical Information Systems have proved their potentialities in this scope, but they are not always adapted to the management of features at the scale of a particular archaeological site. Therefore this paper aims to present the development of a Virtual Research Environment dedicated to the exploitation of intra-site Cultural Heritage data. The Information System produced is based on open-source software modules dedicated to the Internet, so users can avoid being software driven and can register and consult data from different computers. The system gives the opportunity to do exploratory analyses of the data, especially at spatial and temporal levels. The system is compliant to every kind of Cultural Heritage site and allows management of diverse types of data. Some experimentation has been done on sites managed by the Service of the National Sites and Monuments of Luxembourg

A merging data tool for knowledge based photogrammetry: the case study of the castle of shawbak,Jordan

International audienceThe present paper addresses an approach for merging heritage survey and archaeological knowledge. The theoretical framework is the integration between photogrammetric survey and documentation process, practically used in different archaeological excavation. Merging surveyed geometries and knowledge is a complex task. Many variables have to be considered during the process of merging. Photogrammetric survey results and knowledge can be actually seen as information. Information is sorted by source. A source is a set of information provided by the operators involved in the excavation process. Such operators can be archaeologists, photogrammetrists, or any other researcher (i.e. a topographist) involved in the study. The merging process involves the verification of the consistency of different sources and the aggregation of all the information from the sources into a global result. Each source, respectively each operator, owns a personal representation of his knowledge domain, a photogrammetrist uses geometrical primitive and 3D representations of the object surveyed, an archaeologist has a textual and semantic representation of the objects. Merging together all these sets of information needs a tool which can be easily operated by most of the participants in the research and which can furthermore manage the ‘multiple knowledge' on the surveyed object. This tool, called Ametist, an acronym standing for Arpenteur ManagEment Tool for Interactive Survey Treatment, uses a simple interface for displaying results and knowledge in various form (textual, 2D map, 3D scene, XML). This tool can make an automatic merging of the “multiple knowledge” and its merge engine can solve conflicts (object identification mismatch, measure of an object taken several times, spatial collisions etc.). When conflicts cannot automatically be solved the application can report about inconsistency errors and ask a user to manually correct the information involved. As inconsistency can be present in any information, all operators have to be able to use the interface. The tool provides a simple easy to use interface. This document will first address the concept of knowledge based photogrammetry (with ARPENTEUR) and then deal with a presentation of ‘Ametist'. Finally, a real case study will be considered to highlight the first results of such a system in the frame of a French Italian scientific partnership with the “Dipartimento di Studi storici e Geografici” of the University of Florence, in charge of the archaeological research. The selected case study is the Castle of Shawbak, in Jordan, known in medieval written sources as the “Crac de Montréal”

Surveying medieval archaeology: a new form for Harris paradigm linking photogrammetry and temporal relations

The paper presents some reflexions concerning an interdisciplinary project between Medieval Archaeologists from the University of Florence (Italy) and ICT researchers from CNRS LSIS of Marseille (France), aiming towards a connection between 3D spatial representation and archaeological knowledge. It is well known that Laser Scanner, Photogrammetry and Computer Vision are very attractive tools for archaeologists, although the integration of representation of space and representation of archaeological time has not yet found a methodological standard of reference. We try to develop an integrated system for archaeological 3D survey and all other types of archaeological data and knowledge through integrating observable (material) and non-graphic (interpretive) data. Survey plays a central role, since it is both a metric representation of the archaeological site and, to a wider extent, an interpretation of it (being also a common basis for communication between the 2 teams). More specifically 3D survey is crucial, allowing archaeologists to connect actual spatial assets to the stratigraphic formation processes (i.e. to the archaeological time) and to translate spatial observations into historical interpretation of the site. We propose a common formalism for describing photogrammetrical survey and archaeological knowledge stemming from ontologies: Indeed, ontologies are fully used to model and store 3D data and archaeological knowledge. Xe equip this formalism with a qualitative representation of time. Stratigraphic analyses (both of excavated deposits and of upstanding structures) are closely related to E. C. Harris theory of "Stratigraphic Unit" ("US" from now on). Every US is connected to the others by geometric, topological and, eventually, temporal links, and are recorded by the 3D photogrammetric survey. However, the limitations of the Harris Matrix approach lead to use another representation formalism for stratigraphic relationships, namely Qualitative Constraints Networks (QCN) successfully used in the domain of knowledge representation and reasoning in artificial intelligence for representing temporal relations

Recalage hétérogène de nuages de points 3D : Application à l'imagerie sous-marine

National audienceThe registration of two 3D point clouds is an essential step in many applications. The objective of our work is to estimate the isometric transformation to merge two heterogeneous point clouds obtained from two different sensors. In this paper, we present a new approach for 3D - 3D registration which is distinguished by the nature of the extracted signature on each point and by the similarity criterion used to measure the degree of similarity. The descriptor that we propose is invariant to the rotation and also to the translation and overcomes the problem of multi - resolution that is related to heterogeneous data. At the end, our approach has been tested on synthetic data and applied on heterogeneou s real data.Le recalage de deux nuages de points 3D est une étape essentielle dans de nombreuses applications. L’objectif de notre travail est d’estimer une transformation isométrique permettant de fusionner au mieux deux ensembles hétérogènes de points issus de deux capteurs différents. Dans cet article, nous présenterons une méthode de recalage 3D - 3D originale qui se distingue par la nature de la signature extraite en chaque point et par le critère de similarité utilisé pour mesurer le degré de ressemblance. Le descripteur que nous pr oposons est invariant à la rotation et à la translation et permet également de s’affranchir du problème de la multi - résolution relatif aux données hétérogènes. Dans le but de valider notre approche, nous l’avons testé sur des données synthétiques et nous l’avons appliqué sur des données réelles hétérogènes

Clustering over the Cultural Heritage Linked Open Dataset: Xlendi Shipwreck

International audienceCultural heritage (CH) resources are very diverse, heterogeneous , discontinuous and subject to possible updates and revisions in nature. The use of semantic web technologies associated with 3D graph-ical tools is proposed to improve the access, the exploration, the mining and the enrichment of this CH data in a standardized and more struc-tured form. This paper presents a new ontology-based tool that allows to visualize spatial clustering over 3D distribution of CH artifacts. The data that we are processing consists of the archaeological shipwreck "Xlendi, Malta", which was collected by photogrammtry and modeled by the Ar-penteur ontology. Following semantic web best practices, the produced CH dataset was published as linked open data (LOD)