Semantically rich 3D documentation for the preservation of tangible heritage

Traditionally, 3D acquisition technologies have been used to record heritage artefacts and to support specific tasks such as conservation or provenance verification. These exercises are usually a one-off as the technology and resources required are cost intensive. However, there is a recent impetus on the creation of 3D collections to document heritage artefacts which are semantically enriched by using annotations. A requirement of these solutions is the ability to support several representations of a heritage artefact recorded through time. This paper will propose an infrastructure to systematically enrich 3D shapes in a collection by using propagated annotations. In addition, it will describe the mechanisms for annotating, propagating and structuring the annotations using the CIDOC-CRM ontology. The results of this research have the potential to support heritage organisations in making their semantically rich 3D content available to a wider audience of professionals.