Digital 3D recon­struc­tion as a rese­arch envi­ron­ment in art and archi­tec­ture history | Uncer­tainty visua­li­sa­tion and presentation

The emer­ging BIM metho­do­logy and the exchange data format IFC are chan­ging the way of col­la­bo­ra­tion, visua­li­sa­tion and docu­men­ta­tion in 3D models for plan­ning, con­struc­tion and faculty manage­ment pro­cesses. The intro­duc­tion and deve­lo­p­ment of the Semantic Web, sprea­ding the idea of struc­tured, for­ma­lised and linked data, offers seman­ti­cally enri­ched human- and machine-read­able data.

In con­trast to civil engi­nee­ring (BIM/​IFC) and cul­tural heri­tage (CIDOC CRM), aca­demic object-ori­ented disci­plines, like archaeo­logy, art and archi­tec­ture history, are acting as out­side spec­ta­tors. Since the 1990s, however, it has been argued that a 3D model is not likely to be con­si­dered a sci­en­tific recon­struc­tion unless it is grounded on accu­rate docu­men­ta­tion and visualisation.

Thus, there have been many calls for an approved e‑documentation related to 3D recon­struc­tion pro­jects, but these stan­dards are still mis­sing and the vali­da­tion of the out­comes is not ful­filled. Mean­while, the digital rese­arch data remain ephe­meral and the 3D recon­struc­tion pro­jects con­tinue to fill the gro­wing digital cemeteries.

The dis­ser­ta­tion by Irene Caz­zaro focuses, in this con­text, on uncer­tainty clas­si­fi­ca­tion and visua­li­sa­tion for source-based 3D recon­struc­tions in the domain of archaeo­logy, art and archi­tec­ture history. The app­li­ca­tion of an uncer­tainty scale to these models is in fact of vital impor­t­ance in order to declare to which extent the collected docu­ments allow an accu­rate reconstruction.
The main ques­tions that are taken into con­si­de­ra­tion are:

• How can we express the degree of uncer­tainty in the visua­li­sa­tion of the (human- and machine-read­able) data model?
• What kind of fea­tures of an online 3D viewer – to be inte­grated in a col­la­bo­ra­tive web-based vir­tual rese­arch envi­ron­ment (VRE) – are necessary to docu­ment and repre­sent uncer­tainty in hypo­the­tical reconstructions?

These are inter­re­lated ques­tions that lead, first of all, to the explo­ra­tion of the attempts to define a series of stan­dards for 3D models, from the Nara docu­ment (1994) to the London Charter (2006) and the Princi­ples of Seville for archaeo­lo­gical 3D recon­struc­tions (2011).
The work initi­ally focuses on ter­mi­no­logy (high­ligh­ting the impor­t­ance of uni­for­mity in the use of terms that should be clearly defined to become a stan­dard inside a com­mu­nity) and on the defi­ni­tion of a work­flow espe­cially related to uncer­tainty repre­sen­ta­tion in hypo­the­tical 3D digital recon­struc­tions. The work­flow is then app­lied to a series of models – obtained with dif­fe­rent soft­ware and exported in dif­fe­rent for­mats – with the aim of publi­shing them in a sci­en­tific repo­si­tory and tes­ting to which extent infor­ma­tion about uncer­tainty is pre­served: this may be visua­lised through an inte­grated web-based 3D viewer and/​or docu­mented in the form of metadata.
In the end, this pro­cess will lead to a vali­da­tion or a cor­rec­tion of the initial assump­tions on which the pro­posed work­flow is based, but also to a better defi­ni­tion of the levels of uncer­tainty – from ter­mi­no­logy to cate­go­ri­sa­tion and visualisation.

Betreuer

Prof. Fabrizio Ivan Apol­lonio – Dipar­ti­mento di Archi­tettura, Uni­ver­sità di Bologna & Prof. Dr.-Ing. Piotr Kuro­c­zyński – Archi­tek­tur­in­stitut der Hoch­schule Mainz

Lauf­zeit des Projekts

November 2019 – October 2022

Betei­ligt