From paper to web: automatic generation of a web-accessible 3D repository of pottery types

3D web repositories are a hot topic for the research community in general. In the Cultural Heritage (CH) context, 3D repositories pose a difficult challenge due to the complexity and variability of models and to the need of structured and coherent metadata for browsing and searching. This paper presents one of the efforts of the ArchAIDE project: to create a structured and semantically-rich 3D database of pottery types, usable by archaeologists and other communities. For example, researchers working on shape-based analysis and automatic classification. The automated workflow described here starts from pages of a printed catalog, extracts the textual and graphical description of a pottery type, and processes those data to produce structured metadata information and a 3D representation. These information are then ingested in the database, where they become accessible by the community using dynamically-created web presentation pages, showing in a common context: 3D, 2D and metadata information.