An Architecture and a Visual Interface for Tagging the 3D Web

Content classification performed by end users is spreading through the web. Most of the work done so far is related to the hypermedia web. In spite of that, there is a growing mass of 3D content that is not associated to high-level information. This situation prevents any advanced use of the data available, such as searching, extraction or automatic manipulation of such content. In the last few years there have been a number of approaches for adding metadata to 3D content, but most of them use a top-down, designer driven, classification. This work proposes a different approach based on a bottom-up, user driven, classification. A web based architecture for tagging and browsing 3D objects and worlds is presented and applied to a case study related to the cultural heritage domain.