We All Live in a Virtual Submarine
Our seas and oceans hide a plethora of archaeological sites such as ancient shipwrecks that, overtime, are being destroyed through activities such as deepwater trawling and treasure hunting. In 2006, a multidisciplinary team of 11 European institutions established the Venus (Virtual Exploration of Underwater Sites) consortium to make underwater sites more accessible by generating thorough, exhaustive 3D records for virtual exploration. Over the past three years, we surveyed several shipwrecks around Europe and investigated advanced techniques for data acquisition using both autonomous and remotely operated vehicles coupled with innovative sonar and photogrammetric equipment. Access to most underwater sites can be difficult and hazardous owing to deep waters. However, this same inhospitable environment offers extraordinary opportunities to archaeologists because darkness, low temperatures, and low oxygen rates are all favorable to preservation. From a visualization pipeline perspective, this project had two main challenges. First, we had to gather large amounts of raw data from various sources. Then, we had to develop techniques to filter, calibrate, and map the data and then bring it all together into a single accurate visual representation.
Linking Evidence with Heritage Visualization using a large Scale Collaborative Interface
The virtual reconstruction of heritage sites and artefacts is a complicated task that requires researchers to gather and assess many different types of historical evidence which can vary widely in accuracy, authority, completeness, interpretation and opinion. It is now acknowledged that elements of speculation, interpretation and subjectivity form part of 3D reconstruction using primary research sources. Ensuring transparency in the reconstruction process and therefore the ability to evaluate the purpose, accuracy and methodology of the visualization is of great importance. Indeed, given the prevalence of 3D reconstruction in recent heritage research, methods of managing and displaying reconstructions alongside their associated metadata and sources has become an emerging area of research. In this paper, we describe the development of techniques that allow research sources to be added as multimedia annotations to a 3D reconstruction of the British Empire Exhibition of 1938. By connecting a series of wireless touchpad PCs with an embedded webserver we provide users with a unique collaborative interface for semantic description and placement of objects within a 3D scene. Our interface allows groups of users to simultaneously create annotations, whilst also allowing them to move freely within a large display visualization environment. The development of a unique, life-size, stereo visualization of this lost architecture with spatialised semantic annotations enhances not only the engagement with and understanding of this significant event in history, but the accountability of the research process itself.
From Tableaux to Automata for Description Logics
This paper investigates the relationship between automata- and tableau-based inference procedures for description logics. To be more precise, we develop an abstract notion of what a tableau-based algorithm is, and then show, on this abstract level, how tableau-based algorithms can be converted into automata-based algorithms. In particular, this allows us to characterize a large class of tableau-based algorithms that imply an ExpTime upper-bound for reasoning in the description logics for which such an algorithm exists.