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zJust as US Internet giant Google has made great strides in preserving digital versions of great literature and books with its Google Books project, European scientists hope they can create an online repository of culture and archaeology.

The system planned for the undertaking is dubbed 3D-COFORM. It should provide the platform into which humanity’s most important treasures, reflecting thousands of years of cultural development, can be gathered in one online archive for easy access.

Work is already under way to store images of thousands of statues, temple fragments and artworks. As part of the archive, it will be possible to enjoy them, either on a computer screen or in a museum or depot.

“If enough partners join up, there could be millions of exhibits in our database when we’re done,” said Andre Stork, who is coordinating the German side of the project at the IGD Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research.

The head of industrial applications, he and his team began working on the project’s software infrastructure at the end of 2008.

However, it wasn’t until last November that the team got its first virtual 3-D piece of art online: a true-to-the-original replica of Michelangelo’s David.

“We want to turn to Egypt’s Sphinx or some of the buildings of the Roman Forum next,” Stork said.

Stork and his colleagues hope their project will provide a boost to their peers in art history and archaeology around the world. For example, once 3D-COFORM’s data set is big enough, it will make it much easier to run comparisons on objects gathering dust in storehouses.

An online archive will also help curators and restorers, since documenting works by looking at their online copies will mean that the originals are spared from handling and potential damage.

But there’s a lot of work to be done before the digital copies can rotate serenely on a scientist’s screen.

“With a photo-based process, we compress multiple pictures of the object, step-by-step, which, when put together, match up to its dimensions,” said Sebastian Pena Serna, a scientific assistant at the Fraunhofer Institute.

Alternatively, a laser scanner can shoot light points at busts, columns, spears or vases. “The overlaying cloud of points creates triangulations, which lead to a replica of the object,” Sterna said.

The software’s algorithms are supposedly so precise that they can pick up tears or wrinkles. And processes that work in 3-D are even less trouble in 2-D. In a 2004 project, the “Mona Lisa” was scanned to check the surface and color conditions of the world’s most famous painting.

“That’s more of a side event for us,” Stork said.

When it’s fully developed, 3D-COFORM will also include pictures, texts, videos and audio works. The computer scientists promise “a real multimedia format.”

Once data and metadata are completely linked, more kinds of search requests should be possible, including cataloging data on excavation projects and checking art history hypotheses. Thus, a scientist could request a search of all statues by a certain artist from Cyprus.

So far, researchers have found partners from five different countries. Prestigious museums are testing the technology or have already announced plans to cooperate, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Florentine Museum, Cyprus’s World Heritage sites and Berlin’s city museums.

Just like Google’s goal of digitizing all books, 3D-COFORM’s creators are as ambitious when it comes to museum pieces. They want to “digitalize mankind’s legacy.”

But unlike Google, they aren’t working for a private company, a fact that has caused many to question Google’s motives. It’s also telling that the project has won some support from the European Union and several countries, Stork said.

Eventually, the goal is to extend online access to laymen. “We don’t want to automatically digitize everything. We’re first focused on delivering the technical basis.”

Visit www.3d-coform.eu for more information. 



DPA