Show Me the Data!: Structuring the MayaArch3D Digital Collections for Research Queries in a 3DWebGIS

Summary

Archaeological projects are increasingly acquiring 3D data sets of individual finds, as well as whole cities. The archaeologist receives the model as a 3D PDF, video, point cloud or object file. Views of the model are published in a journal, shown in an exhibition and the pipeline usually ends here. Typically, archaeologists do not use the 3D model for much more than visualization purposes. The MayaArch3D project is building a 3DWebGIS to enable archaeologists to do more with these models –to store, share and analyze their 3D models online in the context of geographically referenced archaeological data within an online, virtual research environment (VRE). To do this, we use the models as visual storage containers and link them to spatially-referenced archaeological data. As the archaeological partner in the project, our challenge at the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) is to not only to determine for which objects 3D models should be made, but then to conceptually segment and structure the 3D models as well as their associated archaeological data so that they can be linked together in our 3DWebGIS for both visualization and analysis. This paper introduces the MayaArch3D collections and explains the data structuring pipeline.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• MayaArch3D: Building a 3DWebGIS Documentation and Analysis System for Complex Archaeological Sites   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage