Reasoning on Crowd-Sourced Semantic Annotations to Facilitate Cataloguing of 3D Artefacts in the Cultural Heritage Domain

The 3D Semantic Annotation (3DSA) system expedites the classification of 3D digital surrogates from the cultural heritage domain, by leveraging crowd-sourced semantic annotations. More specifically, the 3DSA system generates high-level classifications of 3D objects by applying rule-based reasoning across community-generated annotations and low-level shape and size attributes. This paper describes a particular use of the 3DSA system – cataloguing Greek pottery. It also describes our novel approach to rule-based reasoning that is modelled on concepts inspired from Markov logic networks. Our evaluation of this approach demonstrates its efficiency, accuracy and versatility, compared to classical rule-based reasoning.