Large-Scale Metadata Processing for 3D Cultural Heritage Objects

Large-scale datasets such as Objaverse or ShapeNet and repositories such as Sketchfab have been compiled for 3D content. Within the European 3DBigDataSpace project, a consortium of 10 partners assess open licensed 3D models to select and retrieve those models representing cultural heritage objects in Europe to aggregate them into the European Data Space. A key component of this work is the classification and geolocalization of 3D content, with mesh models viewable via different viewers and tested in different scenarios such as museum exhibitions, cultural tourism, or education. This article makes four principal contributions: (1) a current empirical overview of the global distribution and linguistic coverage of large-scale 3D heritage datasets; (2) a comparative evaluation of text-based and image-based methods for geocoding and semantic classification; (3) an analysis of data quality challenges specific to uncurated 3D heritage collections; and (4) a discussion of the implications of user-generated content for definitions of digital cultural heritage.