ABSTRACT
Transparency is a necessary element for the use of digital representations in scholarly and scientific discourse. Digital-based scholarship, distributed collaboration and future reuse of today's investment in digitization require the means to evaluate a digital representation's quality and reliability. Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) is an example of an empirical data acquisition tool specifically designed to permit complete lab notebook recording and semantic knowledge management through the Conceptual Reference Model (CRM). RTI is an example of computational extraction of 3D information from a sequence of digital photographs to capture the colour and 3D shape of real world objects. RTI is an image-based technology where the operator's post-processing can be reduced to trivial levels. The RTI process has been used as a model to explore the development of empirical provenance and semantic knowledge management tools. Employing digital photography to provide the empirical data for digital surrogates also lowers financial barriers to digital technology adoption.
