Re: Reinvigoration?

Hello, everyone!

I think 3D work could be a great way to get discussion (and possibly more) going. Here at the Smithsonian Institution, our Digitization Program Office has been working hard on tooling for 3D work, including workflow software and metadata constructions, with my group in a supporting role. We have certainly seen already how difficult it is to steer a course that avoids lock-in (vendor-driven and otherwise) while still taking advantage of the latest techniques. I'm going to try to get some of our DPO folks (who can speak more accurate and specifically to our efforts) to hang out here, but meanwhile, I'd love to hear from other sites/orgs/projects working in the 3D space, particularly on the topic of models for description.

I agree with Bruno that working in synch with IIIF is a no-brainer, and I would add to his mention of Open Annotation facilities Apache's incubating project Apache Annotator [1] which features some of the same folks who produced the Open Annotation rec to begin with.

(Bruno-- good to see you somewhere other than Jena! :grin:)

---
A. Soroka 
Research Computing : Office of the CIO : the Smithsonian Institution

[1] https://annotator.apache.org/

> On Nov 3, 2018, at 10:53 PM, Bruno P. Kinoshita <kinow@apache.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi Robert,
> 
> I am a bit away from Open Source, semantic web, Apache Foundation, etc, due to new role at work.
> 
> But just before this role, I was getting involved with IIIF, and trying to find local (New Zealand) players interested or already working on that. But alas found only the local museum, and nothing public about their use cases.
> 
> James Gurney, an American artist that I follow, recently published a post about the Chicago Arts Institute releasing hi-res image files. And I was really happy to see that they chose IIIF as the open access format.
> 
> IIIF has also a 3d community group (https://iiif.io/community/groups/3d/), and there are tools being built to add metadata to files shared via IIIF - one I used briefly for an experiment was SimpleAnnotationServer, built using Apache Jena to store triples with metadata about the images, allowing users to add annotations. And if I remember well, these annotations were added using W3C's Open Annotation.
> 
> 
> Working with industry and academia, I had seen proprietary formats, and also custom built solutions for storing and sharing. But IIIF is the standard that I enjoyed the most. Their community is quite healthy, and for developers there are lots of open challenges (lots of parallels with GIS, challenges for metadata, load balancing, caching, tiling).
> 
> Just my 0.02 cents.
> 
> Cheers
> Bruno
> 
> 
> ________________________________
> From: Robert Sanderson <azaroth42@gmail.com>
> To: public-art@w3.org 
> Sent: Sunday, 4 November 2018 10:04 AM
> Subject: Reinvigoration?
> 
> 
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> 
> Two weeks ago was W3C's TPAC conference in Lyon, France. If you were there and I missed you, I apologize, it would have been lovely to connect in person.
> 
> Talking with Angel and Adam Soroka of the Smithsonian, it was suggested that setting at least an interim chair would be a great way to start to reinvigorate the group again. As such, I am happy to try to shake the bushes a little bit and see what we can make happen.
> 
> My own travels took me then to Cyprus to a Digital Cultural Heritage concept. The discussions there revolved around standards and collaboration, but only very rarely in the context of the web architecture. The topics ranged from Linked Open Data and documentation standards, through to large scale 3d digitization and publication of models.  Institutions came from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, with a smaller contingent of North Americans, which was a lovely reminder that via the web, we are truly a global society with enduring and engaging local cultures that deserve to be recognized and understood. 
> 
> A chilling reminder of the dangers of centralization and delegation of our responsibilities as cultural organizations then came with the announcement from flickr's new owners that they will limit free accounts to 1000 photographs and simply delete the rest after a relatively short grace period to pay up. It's not known how many organizations contribute to Flickr Commons via free accounts with more than 1000 photos, but it's clear that we must not rely on the indefinite goodwill of such platforms to give us free lunches.
> 
> We see the beginnings of this in the 3d domain. Various corporations are vying for the position that flickr had in its early days for hosting and publishing 3d models, in their own proprietary formats. We must learn from history and instead work together to come to agreement as a community around standards that can be implemented independently and interoperably, resulting in a marketplace of solutions both open source and commercial rather than a monopoly for the few first movers.
> 
> I would like to propose that a valuable starting point for discussions would be an analysis of current web-oriented standards for the description, digitization and dissemination of 2d and 3d objects of cultural significance.  This can be wide ranging, as we focus in on what our joint interests and expertise would make it productive to actually work on.
> 
> I hope you will share your experiences, opinions and technologies with the group to further our mutual aims!
> 
> Rob Sanderson
> -- 
> 
> Rob Sanderson
> Semantic Architect
> The Getty Trust
> Los Angeles, CA 90049
> 
> 

Received on Monday, 12 November 2018 19:26:31 UTC