Issues with Web-Publishable Digital Objects

Our goal is to promote the publication and standardization of digital objects stored on the web to enable model and object reuse. A digital object is an electronic representation of a physical object, including models of the object. There remain many challenges and issues regarding the representation and utilization of these objects, since it is not clear, for example, who will create certain objects, who will maintain the objects, and what levels of abstraction will be used in each object. This article introduces some of the technical and philosophical issues regarding digital object publication, with the aim of enumerating technical, sociological and nancial problems to be addressed.