Aïoli: A reality-based 3D annotation cloud platform for the collaborative documentation of cultural heritage artefacts

Archaeologists, architects, engineers, materials specialists, teachers, curators and restorers of cultural property, contribute to the daily knowledge and conservation of heritage artefacts. For many years, the development of digital technologies has produced important results in the collection, visualisation and indexing of digital resources. Whilst these advances have made it possible to introduce new tools that are making documentation practices evolve within the cultural heritage community, the management of multi-dimensional and multi-format data introduces new problems and challenges, in particular the development of relevant analysis and interpretation methods, the sharing and correlation of heterogeneous data among several actors and contexts, and the centralised archiving of documentation results for long-term preservation purposes. Despite their different approaches and tools for observation, description and analysis, the actors of cultural heritage documentation all have a common interest and central focus: the heritage object, the physical one, whether it is a site, a building, a sculpture, a painting, a work of art, or an archaeological fragment. This is the starting point for the development of “Aïoli”, a reality-based 3D annotation platform, which allows a multidisciplinary community to build semantically-enriched 3D descriptions of heritage artefacts from simple images and spatialised annotations coupled with additional resources. Resulting from more than 10 years of methodological and technological contributions concerning different steps of the workflow starting from reality-based 3D reconstruction to the analysis of cultural heritage data, this platform introduces an innovative framework for the comprehensive, large-scale collaborative documentation of cultural heritage by integrating state-of-the-art technological components within a cloud infrastructure accessible via web interfaces from PCs, tablets and smartphones online and onsite. This paper aims to provide a synthesis of the work done to build it, to describe its main features, and to discuss the limitations and opportunities it raises for cultural heritage studies.