Quality Criteria for Architectural 3D Data in Usage and Preservation Processes

Quality assessment of digital material has been just one of the new tasks the
digital revolution brought into the library domain. With the first big print material digitization efforts in the digital heritage domain dating back to the 1980ies, plenty of experience has been gathered and recommendations on best-practise published. Along the same line, libraries of today may often publish guidelines on formats or quality parameters for digital textual materials which enter their holdings. While digital texts such as e-journals are in common use today, non-textual materials of various domains are just entering the holdings of cultural heritage institutions. An example for this is architectural data, which is of interest to a variety of libraries and
archives – ranging from special collection libraries, such as the RIBA Library of the Royal Institute of British Architects, to national archives responsible for the archival of information about publically funded buildings. Architectural practise of today commonly includes 3D object processing. The output of these processes is slowly reaching the aforementioned cultural heritage institutions which are now facing the task of quality assessment of the material.
The paper will present a first analysis of potential quality factors and compare
architectural and cultural heritage domain expectations in 3D data quality. It will look at two forms of 3D data: modelled 3D objects and scanned 3D objects. The work presented in this paper is based on work conducted in the ongoing EU FP-7 DURAARK project.