OPENHERITAGE3D: BUILDING AN OPEN VISUAL ARCHIVE FOR SITE SCALE GIGA-RESOLUTION LIDAR AND PHOTOGRAMMETRY DATA

Abstract. LiDAR and photogrammetry are common mechanisms for the documentation of cultural heritage sites. Their outputs provide foundational primary sources for research and important engineering decisions contributing to the on-going conservation of sites and structures. Unfortunately, due to the complex nature of these data, they are rarely shared with stakeholders in their full forms. Raw data is routinely transferred to portable hard drives and forgotten at a project’s end. Digital heritage documentation, often acquired with great effort and cost, is at risk of loss (UNESCO 2003). When these data are shared, they are rarely presented or formatted in ways which enable their widespread re-use. As processing tools improve at a rapid pace, and offer new pipelines for improved reconstruction and fusion with additional data sources, it is important to preserve the data in a way which maintains all functionality and interoperability between processing platforms. It's not enough to share data or to simply make them "available." Data must be technologically and intellectually intelligible (and useful). A new system framework is required to ensure their integrity and wide-spread utility, and to democratize these data for re-use by the diverse communities of stakeholders with whose purposes fall outside the narrow scopes of a 3D documentation project’s original goals. In this paper we present OpenHeritage3D.org as a platform and framework for an open visual archive seeking to provide authoritative and democratized access to site-scale lidar and photogrammetry through data curation, file-sharing, and web-visualization systems with granular segmentation and data conversion capabilities.