D4.17 New version of the Aïoli platform

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 practises 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 interpretationmethods, the sharing and correlation of heterogeneous data among several actors and contexts, and the centralised archiving of documentation results for long-termpreservation 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 spatialized annotations coupled with additional resources. This platform introduces an innovative framework for the comprehensive, large-scale collaborative documentation of cultural heritage by integrating state-of-the-art technological components (image-based 3D reconstruction, 2D-3D spreading and correlation of semantic annotations, multi-layered analysis of qualitative and quantitative attributes, etc.) within a cloud infrastructure accessible via web interfaces from PCs, tablets, and smartphones online and onsite.

This document describes the evolutions of Aioli and the new features implemented within the framework of the SSHOC project since its previous version. The development version of Aioli is currently hosted on one of the CNRS MAP servers and can be accessed through the following link: https://absinthe.aioli.map.cnrs.fr/index. A beta testing version of the platform will be available at https://beta.aioli.map.cnrs.fr/index (send mail to contact@aioli.cloud for an account creation).