A Repository Infrastructure for Working with 3D Assets in Cultural Heritage

The development of a European market for digital cultural heritage assets is impeded by the lack of a suitable digital marketplace, i.e., a commonly accepted exchange platform for digital assets. We have developed the technology for such a platform over the last two years: The 3D-COFORM Repository Infrastructure (RI) is a secure content management infrastructure for the distributed processing of large-volume datasets. Three of the key features of this system are (1) owners have complete control over their data, (2) binary data must have attached metadata, and (3) processing histories are documented. Our system can support the complete production pipeline for digital assets from data acquisition (photo, 3D scan) over processing (cleaning, hole filling) to interactive presentation and content delivery over the internet. In this paper we present the components of the system and their interplay. One particular focus of the software development was to make it as easy as possible to connect client-side applications to the RI. Therefore we present the RI-API in some detail and present several RI-enabled client-side applications that use it.