ABSTRACT
The context of cultural heritage, the term '3D modelling' very often refers to the process of creating a digital replica of a real object of cultural value. This might be a bone, a coin, a sherd or a whole amphora, a rotten shipwreck or ruins of ancient buildings. The shape description problem has also been discussed from a cultural heritage point of view in the context of the EPOCH project. This seems like a philosophical question, but it has wide-ranging, practical consequences. The discussion touched on the issue of choosing the right technology for storing, processing and querying 3D data in a digital computer. In the case of 3D data, this entails recording the relation between the input and output of a complex processing pipeline. If all information is available to reproduce a given cultural 3D model, then the model can be said to be intellectually transparent.
