An enhanced distributed repository for working with 3D assets in cultural heritage

The development of a European market for digital cultural heritage assets is impeded by the lack of a suitable marketplace, i.e., a commonly accepted distributed exchange platform for digital assets. We have developed such a platform over the last two years, a centralized content management system with distributed storage capability and semantic query functionality. It supports the complete pipeline from data acquisition (photo, 3D scan) over processing (cleaning, hole filling) to interactive presentation, and allows collecting a complete process description (paradata) alongside. In this paper we present the components of the system and explain their interplay. Furthermore, we present and explain which functional components, from transactions to permission management, are needed to operate the system. Finally, we prove the suitability of the API and present a few software applications that use it.