A Cloud Architecture for Processing and Visualization of

Geo-located 3D Digital Cultural Heritage Models

Ikrom Nishanbaev

School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, Curtin University, Perth, WA 6845, Australia

Keywords: Web-GIS, Geo-located 3D Cultural Heritage Models, 3D Visualization, Web Repositories for 3D Models,

Cultural Heritage.

Abstract: The increasing affordability of surveying methods such as laser scanning and photogrammetry has aroused

broad and current interest in 3D modelling among cultural heritage preservation specialists. This generated,

in recent years, many digital cultural heritage preservation projects across the globe that aimed at documenting

cultural heritage sites and objects in a 3D form. Once 3D cultural heritage models have been created, the next

step is generally to assure their long-term digital storage, dissemination, and visualization. To this end, this

article presents a new cloud architecture for processing and visualization of geo-located 3D cultural heritage

models over the web, which has been accomplished by integrating maps, 3D cultural heritage models, and the

geospatial data associated with the location of 3D cultural heritage models. The cloud architecture is based

on Amazon Web Services, while the core framework for handling the content is managed by free and open-

source, database-driven, easy-to-implement KeystoneJS Content Management System. All other frameworks

used in the architecture such as for web mapping, 3D visualization, etc. are also based on free and open-source

paradigm, which allows flexibility on extensions and re-use. The proposed architecture has been validated

through a use-case applied to Australian 3D cultural heritage models.

1 INTRODUCTION

In recent years, 3D modelling has become a

widespread tool among CH preservation specialists.

One of the reasons for this is the increasing

affordability of surveying methods such as laser

scanning and photogrammetry, which can efficiently

and accurately survey tiny cultural heritage (CH)

objects as well as complex CH sites (Remondino,

2011). This generated, in recent years, many digital

CH preservation projects across the globe to

document CH objects and sites in a 3D form

(D'Andrea, Niccolucci, Bassett, & Fernie, 2012). The

resulting 3D CH models are often employed not only

for preservation purposes but also for other purposes

such as 3D Geographic Information Systems (GIS),

augmented reality, and virtual reality among others

(Campanaro, Landeschi, Dell’unto, & Leander

Touati, 2016). Furthermore, there are cloud

computing-based web repositories, web-GIS

platforms, and archives are emerging for long-term

storage, visualization, and analysis of 3D digital CH

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0032-3283

models. Cloud computing offers many benefits over

traditional approaches (e.g. on-premise

infrastructure) such as scalability, flexibility, and

potential to reduce IT (information technologies)

costs among others. Scalability of the cloud

computing refers to the ability of the system in which

every application or infrastructure can be scaled up

and scaled down based on the workload (Falatah &

Batarfi, 2014; Lee & Kim, 2010; Singh & Malhotra,

2012). While flexibility in cloud computing allows

employees to be more flexible in terms of accessing

files through web browsers, collaboration, access

from different devices and location among others

(Bharadwaj & Lal, 2012; Sultan, 2014). Finally, IT

costs can be reduced through a reduction in spending

on hardware, software, infrastructure, and IT staff

among others (Chandra & Borah, 2012; De Assunção,

Di Costanzo, & Buyya, 2009).

Despite the fact that there are some web platforms

and archives for 3D content such as OMEKA, 3D-

COFORM, Sketchfab, TurboSquid, 3D CH models

are still problematic to find, use and re-use. A recent

Nishanbaev, I.

A Cloud Architecture for Processing and Visualization of Geo-located 3D Digital Cultural Heritage Models.

DOI: 10.5220/0009341500510061

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management (GISTAM 2020), pages 51-61

ISBN: 978-989-758-425-1

survey of Champion and Rahaman (Champion &

Rahaman, 2019), who surveyed 14 proceedings of

leading digital heritage events and conferences,

revealed that out of 1483 examined conference

articles only 17.9% or 264 articles incorporated 3D

models or images of 3D models. Even more dramatic

is only 9 articles had accessible 3D content.

Furthermore, in most cases, 3D digital CH models

incorporate geospatial information relating to the

location of the CH site and object.

To this end, this article presents a new cloud-

based architecture for integrating maps, 3D digital

CH models and geospatial data such as geolocation.

The cloud architecture is based on Amazon Web

Services (AWS), while the core framework for

handling the content is managed by free and

open-source, database-driven, easy-to-implement

KeystoneJS Content Management System (CMS).

All other frameworks used in the architecture such as

for web mapping, 3D visualization, etc. are also based

on free and open-source paradigm, which allows

flexibility on extensions and re-use. The proposed

architecture has been validated through a use-case

applied to Australian 3D CH models. This

architecture can be used, or extended for use, in a

wide range of domains including GIS.

The contributions of this article to the CH and GIS

domains are as follows:

• A new AWS-based cloud architecture to

integrate maps, 3D CH models and geospatial

data such as geolocation. All employed

frameworks in the architecture are free and open-

source, and completely extendable and reusable.

The proposed architecture can also be used in any

other cloud platform, which supports Node.js

environment.

• Since content management including uploading

and editing text data, 3D CH models, and geo-

location within the architecture is based on a

database-driven, easy-to-implement KeystoneJS

CMS, it can help CH and GIS professionals with

limited technical knowledge to implement the

architecture. Furthermore, many time-

consuming web developments such as admin

user interface, session management among

others are handled by the KeystoneJS CMS.

• CH organizations and institutions such as

museums, galleries, and archives can implement

this architecture to present available CH objects

and assets in a 3D digital form on the web. This

can, in turn, help to promote national and

international tourism.

• GIS and CH professionals can extend this

architecture according to their needs. For

instance, raster and vector data can be integrated

with the free and open-source framework of

GeoServer, which supports geospatial data in

many formats and standards.

• Finally, the article extends the existing body of

knowledge and expertise in implementing a

cloud-based architecture for processing and

visualization of geo-located 3D digital models.

2 RELATED WORK

Europeana is a CH platform and aggregator with

more than 30 million digitized objects from more than

2300 European CH institutions and organizations,

while Europeana cloud is one of the largest projects

regarding cloud-based infrastructures for CH

research and data. Europeana Cloud is an initiative by

Europeana Foundation to provide shared cloud

infrastructure for aggregating and exchanging CH

data among European institutions and organizations.

To this end, it offers many services such as unique

identifiers to each CH records, storage and access for

heterogeneous CH data including metadata,

annotation services to add additional data to CH

records, tracking of changes made to CH records,

flexible, scalable and customizable CH data

processing capabilities among others. Europeana

cloud, in terms of technical architecture, has been

implemented on a hybrid cloud architecture by

combining public cloud and private cloud

architectures. This allows taking all the advantages

offered by these two cloud architectures. For instance,

public cloud offers flexibility for scaling up and down

the hardware capabilities based on the workload,

while the private cloud offers more resistance to

failures and less dependency on third-party cloud

providers to name a few (Benardou, Dallas, &

Dunning, 2014; Kats et al., 2014).

The SACHER (Sacher-Project) (The Smart

Architecture for Cultural Heritage in Emilia

Romagna) is a project financed by Regione Emilia-

Romagna within the European Regional

Development Fund. It has developed a cloud-based,

open-source and federated platform to manage

various aspects of tangible CH such as 3D life cycle

management for CH, the multi-dimensional search

engine to find CH data from heterogeneous sources

among others. The platform offers services both to

CH professionals and the public. The cloud platform

used in the project is IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-

service) OpenStack, which is often used to build

private and public clouds. Regarding the server-side

web technology, the project uses the Django web

GISTAM 2020 - 6th International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management

framework, which is written in Python programming

language. Swift Object Storage was employed as a

storage container for 3D models, while 3D Heritage

Online Presenter (3DHOP) was chosen as a

visualization framework for 3D models. The multi-

dimensional search engine in the platform is based on

a NoSQL database of MongoDB. The platform also

incorporates a Google map through which CH places

can be searched by name, address and building type

(Apollonio et al., 2017; Bertacchi et al., 2018).

CNR ITAB (Institute for technologies applied to

cultural heritage), while collaborating with

ARIADNE (Ariadne-Infrastructure-Project) and E-

RIHS (E-RIHS-Project) infrastructure projects,

developed a cloud-based modular architecture to

enable archeologists to build and visualize 3D

landscapes. This architecture was built on a cloud

platform of ownCloud (ownCloud), which comes in

three versions namely ownCloud Community,

ownCloud Online, and ownCloud Enterprise. In all

versions, it provides a free desktop client and iOS and

Android app to upload and manage the data. The

developed cloud architecture offers several services

such as terrain service and gallery service. The former

leverages on WebGL based Virtual Planet Builder

(Virtual-Planet-Builder) tool to load, process and

visualize GIS elevation data such as Digital Elevation

Models (DEM). The latter service allows users to

create, delete, and update projects within the system.

It displays all created terrain databases, status, and if

available, a short description for each entry among

others (Fanini, Pescarin, & Palombini, 2019).

Furthermore, there are some other smaller-scale

projects in this regard such as a collaborative project

by the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh

Parallel Computing Centre, the National Galleries of

Scotland and the Digital Preservation of Coalition.

The name of the project is Cloudy Culture, which

aimed to investigate the potential of EUDAT

(EUDAT) cloud services in CH conservation,

particularly to improve preservation and accessibility

of European CH data hosted in the National Library

of Scotland, and the National Galleries of Scotland.

These two CH institutions collect and host an

extremely large amount of digital CH data such as

maps, books, articles, images among others, which

require safe digital preservation (EUDAT).

Another relating project is by Pisu and Casu

(2013), which proposed a cloud-based web-GIS

framework for documentation and dissemination of

architectural heritage. The web-GIS framework

resulted in a multi-scale and multi-layer information

system applied to Sardinian late gothic architecture.

3 BACKGROUND LITERATURE

3.1 Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the hosting and the delivery of

various services over the Internet. It can include tools

and resources such as servers, databases, networking,

various business applications and software, which can

be leased in an on-demand fashion. Cloud computing

has been given many definitions, however, many

researchers and professionals in this domain have

adopted a definition by the National Institute of

Standards and Technology of the United States

(NIST), which states it as follows:

‘Cloud computing is a model for enabling

convenient, on-demand network access to a shared

pool of configurable computing resources (e.g.,

networks, servers, storage, applications, and

services) that can be rapidly provisioned and

released with minimal management effort or service

provider interaction.’

Cloud computing services can be grouped into

three categories namely software as a service (SaaS),

platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a

service (IaaS).

SaaS refers to cloud computing that offers on-

demand applications over the Internet. An apt

example of this category of cloud computing is

Salesforce (Salesforce), which offers a wide range of

services to business owners (customer relationship

management) to better connect with customers,

potential customers, and partners.

PaaS refers to cloud computing that offers

platform resources such as software development

frameworks and tools. An example of this category of

cloud computing is Heroku (Heroku). It provides

software developers with virtual containers called

‘Dynos’ that can execute software applications

written in various programming languages.

IaaS refers to cloud computing that offers on-

demand infrastructural resources over the Internet.

Examples of this category of cloud computing include

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud - Amazon EC2

(Amazon-EC2), Google Compute Engine (Google-

Compute-Engine) and Digital Ocean (DigitalOcean)

among others. This cloud computing type allows

launching on-demand virtual machines (VMs), which

can then be accessed to perform computing tasks.

Cloud computing also offers several cloud

deployment models, which define how cloud services

are made available to users. Public cloud, private

cloud, hybrid cloud, and community cloud are 4

common deployment models associated with cloud

computing.

A Cloud Architecture for Processing and Visualization of Geo-located 3D Digital Cultural Heritage Models

Public cloud is the type of cloud computing model

that supports all users who want to use cloud

computing resources such as hardware and software

on a subscription basis, in other words, everyone who

subscribed can use the services. It is often used for

application development and testing, file sharing and

other purposes, in which privacy and security of data

are not a high priority.

On the other hand, the private cloud is typically

used by a single organization. This type of cloud

computing deployment can be hosted internally or

externally. This type of cloud deployment offers

greater control over cloud infrastructure and a higher

level of security compared to public cloud

deployment.

Hybrid cloud as the name suggests combines the

best of the private and the public cloud. Many

organizations use this type of cloud deployment as it

allows to take advantage of scalability and cost-

effectiveness of public cloud as well as to execute and

to store mission-critical applications and data in the

private cloud.

In the community cloud deployment model,

multiple organizations share computing resources.

Hence, the hardware and software capabilities of the

cloud are managed and secured commonly by all the

participating organizations. Since access to the cloud

is restricted to the members of the community, many

research organizations and universities often deploy

this type of cloud model to conduct collaborative

research projects (Ali, Khan, & Vasilakos, 2015;

Zafar et al., 2017; Zhang, Cheng, & Boutaba, 2010).

3.2 Web Content Management

Systems, 3D Visualization

Frameworks and 3D File Formats

In recent years, the amount of digital content

available on the Internet has increased significantly.

Many organizations and individuals are, therefore,

deploying web content management systems

(WCMS) to provision and manage their information

on the web. In essence, WCMS is a software

application that can help people with limited technical

knowledge to create and manage websites, and web

content. WCMS often consists of two parts namely

front-end and back-end. The former represents the

web user-interface that users see when they visit the

website. While the latter represents the server-side, in

other words how the website works, changes, and

updates. This usually involves databases and servers.

WCMS may offer organizations and individuals

many benefits such as user-friendly customization of

the front-end, user-friendly web content management

and editing, and easy-to-follow workflows for search

engine optimizations (SEO) among others.

Furthermore, there are many free and open-source

WCMSs available on the Web such as WordPress,

Drupal, Joomla, KeystoneJS to name a few

(Horsman, 2018; McKeever, 2003).

Currently, all modern browsers such as Google

Chrome, Opera, Safari and Firefox support WebGL

technology that allows creating and visualization of

3D graphical applications on the Web. This

technology enables web users to experience

interactive 3D content on webpages without

downloading and installing any plug-ins. WebGL

was originally developed by Mozilla, however,

currently it is maintained by the non-profit

organization called Khronos Group. Since WebGL

leverages two hardware components of a computer

namely central processing unit (CPU) and graphics

processing unit, it offers GPU acceleration to execute

large-scale 3D web applications. Thus, it provides

improved performance and faster running of

applications. The part of the technology that runs on

CPU is written on JavaScript programming language,

while the GPU part is based on OpenGL ES. Despite

the fast execution of 3D web applications, WebGL is

a low-level 3D graphics application programming

interface (API) (WebGL). This means developing 3D

web applications using this technology can be time-

consuming, and in some instances extremely

complicated. For this reason, many WebGL-based

JavaScript libraries have been developed to ease and

accelerate the development of 3D web applications.

Three.js, Babylon.js, sceneJS are among those

libraries, which is widely used to develop interactive

3D web applications. These libraries offer many

technical features such as effects, lights, various

shaders, and virtual reality among others. They run on

all web browsers that support previously discussed

WebGL technology. CesiumJS is another 3D library

used for developing interactive 3d maps. This library

is now an open-standard of Open Geospatial

Consortium (OGC).

3D file formats are used to store information

relating to a 3D object such as geometry, appearance,

scene, and animation. 3D file formats are divided into

two types in terms of licencing, which are proprietary

and non-proprietary. Proprietary formats are native

file formats from software applications, whereas non-

proprietary formats are open-source file formats.

gLTF, Collada, 3D Tiles, and OBJ are some of the

well-known examples of 3D file formats.

GISTAM 2020 - 6th International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management

Figure 1: A methodology for the proposed cloud architecture for processing and visualization of 3D digital cultural heritage

models.

4 METHODOLOGY

To accomplish the proposed cloud architecture, a

methodology as shown in Figure 1 has been

developed. The web application server KeystoneJS

CMS and front-end application in the methodology

are based on the previous research work of the author.

The methodology presented in the article extends

those parts with cloud computing concepts such as

Amazon EC2 Instance, Amazon EBS storage for 3D

CH models, Elastic Load Balancing, PM2 process

manager, the web server of NGINX, cloud installed

MongoDB database among others. This extended

methodology consists of the followings:

Cloud computing infrastructure from AWS

including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS

EC2), Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an operating

system, Web Application Server – Keystone JS CMS,

MongoDB database, Amazon Elastic Block Store

(Amazon EBS), PM2 - Process Manager, Web Server

– NGINX, and Elastic Load Balancing.

Front-end application for administrators which

includes the KeystoneJS authentication system and

KeystoneJS provided back-end interface with custom

fields.

Front-end application for users which includes

Three.js – WebGL-based 3D JavaScript library,

Openlayers 6 – web mapping library, Bootstrap 4 for

the graphical user interface, and jQuery

Datasets including maps, Australian 3D CH

models, 3D model descriptions and geospatial data in

the form of geolocation such as longitude and

latitude.

Finally, users and administrators, who consume

the data and manage the data respectively.

4.1 Cloud Computing

AWS has been selected as a cloud computing

solutions provider as it is dominant and the largest

provider in the cloud computing market.

Furthermore, it offers a variety of services and virtual

machines for various purposes such as from hosting a

small website to Big Data analytics. In the

architecture, EC2 has been deployed to get the cloud

computing capacity and launch the virtual server. As

an operating system of the EC2, Red Hat Enterprise

Linux has been deployed which is a Linux

distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial

market. This operating system was chosen because it

is one of the leading Linux kernels with high security,

reliability, and good community support. The web

application server in this architecture is KeystoneJS

CMS, which is based on Express.js framework and

Node.js runtime environment. Since KeystoneJS is a

database-driven CMS, it comes with a MongoDB

database by default. This database has been utilized

to store all the data within the architecture except for

3D CH models. The storage of 3D models has been

facilitated by Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS),

which is a high-performance storage service to use

with Amazon EC2. Another important feature of this

storage is the possibility to enable the automated

A Cloud Architecture for Processing and Visualization of Geo-located 3D Digital Cultural Heritage Models

capability to back up the data into Amazon S3.

NGINX has been used as a web server in the

architecture, whereas PM2 Process Manger used to

manage and monitor the web application of

KeystoneJS. Finally, Elastic Load Balancing is used

to automatically distribute incoming traffic to the web

application, which helps to improve the

responsiveness of the web application.

4.2 Front-end Application for

Administrators

Front-end application for administrators has been

accomplished with the auto-generated admin user

interface by the KeystoneJS. It also handles the

authentication system for administrators out of the

box. KeystoneJS allows creating as many

administrators as needed. However, one limitation of

KeystoneJS in this regard is it does not provide a

feature to assign roles to the administrators, which

can grant or restrict access to certain fields and

documents within the admin interface. Text data in

the administrator interface is inputted via

WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor,

while files such as 3D CH models are uploaded via

the built-in file upload interface. For the uploaded

content, there are three states available namely draft,

published, and archived.

4.3 Front-end Application for Users

Front-end application for users was achieved using

Three.js, Openlayers 6, Bootstrap 4 and jQuery.

Three.js is a cross-browser 3D JavaScript library

based on previously mentioned WebGL technology,

which facilitated 3D visualization in the architecture.

It offers numerous features to build simple and

complex 3D scenes and worlds. This 3D library has

been chosen because of its non-proprietary license,

integration with all web browsers that support

WebGL, and relatively well-documentation among

others. Openlayers 6 is used for web mapping in the

architecture, which can visualize maps including

geospatial data such as vector data and raster data in

different geospatial files from various sources and

geospatial web mapping standards of Open

Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Since Openlayers is

an open-source, mature, web mapping library with a

strong community of developers, it has been selected

for map and web geospatial data visualization.

Bootstrap 4 framework is used as a helper framework

for graphical user interface implementation. It is the

world’s most popular framework for building the

front-end development of web applications, which is

also known for its responsive and mobile-first

concepts. Since Bootstrap focuses on simplifying the

development of front-end web applications, it offers

several ready-to-use templates and components such

as navigation, forms, and typography. Finally, the

jQuery framework is a JavaScript library for

simplification of HTML DOM manipulation, event

handling, and asynchronous calls. As of writing this

article, it is employed by 74% of the 10 million most

popular websites (W3Techs).

4.4 Datasets

As a use case, eleven different 3D digital CH models

have been deployed to the architecture. All deployed

3D models are digital replicas of the places located in

Australia. As a sample, four of these 3D models are

presented in the article namely Time Ball Tower-

Williamstown, Cape Liptrap, Magnetic Termite and a

part of the Abrolhos Islands. The images of these

places are shown

in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Sample of the employed 3D digital models in the

use case. In a clockwise direction, Time Ball Tower,

Williamstown (Image Source: https://bit.ly/2FfKuuT,

Liptrap (Image Source: https://bit.ly/2MTdNrr, Copyright

by Jorge Lascar. CC BY 2.0), Magnetic Termite (Image

Source: https://bit.ly/2ZO5an6, Copyright by Geoff

Whalan. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0), Abrolhos Islands (Image

source: https://bit.ly/37qOPaG, Copyright by

ernie_greatoutdoors. CC BY-SA 2.0).

One of the best choices with regard to 3D file

formats is glTF as it significantly minimizes the size

and loading times of 3D models in comparison to

other 3D file formats. Hence, all 3D models in the use

case are encoded in glTF format. Furthermore, the

architecture has also been tested with another 3D file

format called “OBJ”. This format is an open format

GISTAM 2020 - 6th International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management

Figure 3: The web interface for users, the map copyright by Microsoft Bing Maps 2019.

by Wavefront technologies, which incorporates three

files. The first file is for storing a 3D object-related

information such as vertices, faces, and has an

extension of “.obj”. Whereas, the second file is a

material template library with an extension of “.mtl”,

which stores the appearance of the 3D model. Finally,

the last file is for storing associated images with the

3D model, which can include more than a single

image file. The file extensions for the images can be

in “.jpeg”, “.png” among others. The path link for all

images is stored in the previously discussed “.mtl”

file.

4.5 Users and Administrators

Users of this cloud-based architecture platform can

view a map, interact with vector data in the form of

point features which represent CH places, read

descriptions of CH places, and view 3D CH models.

Whereas, administrators can create and edit CH

places, upload 3D content to the platform, input

geospatial data such as geolocation associated with

CH places, select and change the state of the content

among others.

5 RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

The cloud architecture integrates web maps, 3D

digital CH models and geospatial information

associated with the 3D CH models in the form of

geolocation, while also offering numerous cloud

architecture benefits such as improved application

performance, scalability, and enhanced

responsiveness.

The overall web interface for users consists of

three main components namely base map, clickable

red markers which represent CH places with relevant

CH information, and viewer for visualization of 3D

CH models. This user interface is shown in Figure 3.

Once a user clicks on a red marker, the pop-up box

appears with the information relating to the CH place

such as name, short description, and licence

information of the 3D model. To view the 3D model,

they should click onto the 3D model button in the

pop-up box.

A Cloud Architecture for Processing and Visualization of Geo-located 3D Digital Cultural Heritage Models

Figure 4: The web interface for administrators, copyright by KeystoneJS, MIT licence 2019.

Figure 5: Use case of Australian 3D cultural heritage models. In a clockwise direction, Time Ball Tower, Williamstown (3D

Model Source: https://bit.ly/2ZJR3PZ, Copyright by Digital Heritage Australia. CC BY 4.0), Cape Liptrap (3D Model Source:

https://bit.ly/2QFMwtI, Copyright by Stefan A Vollgger. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 ), Magnetic Termite (3D Model Source:

https://bit.ly/2syNqjO, Copyright by Rupert Rawnsley. CC BY 4.0), Abrolhos Islands (3D Model Source:

https://bit.ly/2syY9e3, Copyright by Maritime Archeological Association of Western Australia. CC BY 4.0).

GISTAM 2020 - 6th International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management

In KeystoneJS CMS there is no limitation on the

number of administrators. Hence, it allows creating as

many administrators as needed. A page relating to

creating a new CH place and uploading 3D content to

the architecture is shown in Figure 4. When creating

a new CH place, administrators should input the name

of the CH place, description including short

information and licence information of the CH place,

and 3D digital CH model to upload. 3D digital CH

models are automatically uploaded into Amazon EBS

storage and path to the 3D content is stored in the

MongoDB database.

This path is then used in the front-end application to

retrieve the 3D CH model. The administrators can

also select the state of the CH place from 3 options

namely draft, published, archived. These states can

help to manage the process of publication. For

instance, they may upload the content but wish to

publish it later in time. Finally, for each and every CH

place administrators should input geolocation in the

form of longitude and latitude. The precise

geolocation for the most CH places can be found in

the GeoNames platform, which is a geographical

database with more than 11 million place names.

5.1 Use Case of Australian 3D Digital

Cultural Heritage Models

The architecture has been employed in a sample use

case to better evaluate its benefits and limitations. As

mentioned in the datasets section, eleven different

3D digital CH models have been used in this use case.

The visualization of four of these 3D CH models is

shown in Figure 5, which is achieved using the

Three.js 3D visualization library. The 3D models can

be manipulated along the X, Y and Z coordinate axes,

and can be zoomed in and out.

5.2 Level of Customization for the

Front-end 3D Visualization

As mentioned previously, in this architecture 3D

visualization is achieved using the Three.js library,

which offers plenty of customizations. These

customizations include importing and removing

complimentary 3D models at run-time, various

cameras such as orthographic, perspective and stereo

cameras, various audio types such as positional and

non-positional, various lights such as point,

directional, and spot-lights, and three levels of details

(LOD) among others. These customizations can take

effect at run-time as Three.js is capable of updating

scenes continuously.

5.3 Scalability of the Architecture

The proposed architecture is based on AWS, which

offers many features for scalability, load balancing,

etc. The architecture particularly uses Elastic Load

Balancing to automatically distribute incoming

traffic. This offers an on-demand scale-up, in other

words, the ability to increase the number of EC2

instances running the web application when there is a

high load of incoming traffic. Whereas KeystoneJS

CMS handles internal tasks within the web

application. Since KeystoneJS CMS is based on the

Node.js runtime environment, it supports an event-

driven system capable of running asynchronous input

and output. In other words, it can run several

processes separately from the primary application

thread. Therefore, this offers numerous benefits such

as improved application performance, scalability, and

enhanced responsiveness.

6 CONCLUSIONS

With the rapid evolution in digitization technology,

CH professionals are now equipped with advanced

3D surveying tools and techniques. This allows them

to create a realistic 3D digital replica of CH sites and

objects of various sizes including tiny artefacts and

large-scale CH establishments. Nevertheless, 3D CH

models are still difficult to find, use and reuse,

especially those which resulted from the individual

CH research projects. According to the survey

findings of Champion and Rahaman (2019), who

looked at 1483 digital heritage articles published in

14 recent proceedings of major CH conferences, from

the examined 1483 conference articles, only 9 articles

had accessible links to 3D assets.

This article presented a new cloud-based

architecture for integrating maps, 3D digital CH

models and geospatial data, which can be used for

processing, visualization, dissemination and digital

preservation of 3D digital models.

All frameworks used in the architecture such as

for content management, web mapping, 3D

visualization, etc. are based on free and open-source

paradigm, which allows flexibility on extensions and

re-use. For instance, raster and vector data can be

integrated into the architecture by implementing a

free and open-source geospatial framework of

GeoServer, which allows publishing geospatial data

to the web using open standards such as from OGC.

Furthermore, among others, on top of this architecture

geospatial analyses on the web can be performed

A Cloud Architecture for Processing and Visualization of Geo-located 3D Digital Cultural Heritage Models

using Turf.js, web virtual reality can be implemented

using React 360.

The proposed architecture has been validated

through a use-case applied to Australian 3D CH

models.

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