Microformat and Microdata schemas for interactive 3D web content

The paper presents new Microformat and Microdata schemas for creating descriptions of interactive 3D web content. Microformats and Microdata are increasingly popular solutions for creating lightweight attribute-based built-in semantic metadata of web content. However, although Microformats and Microdata enable basic description of media objects, they have not been intended for 3D content. Describing 3D components is more complex than describing standard web pages as the descriptions may relate to different aspects of the 3D content-spatial, temporal, structural, logical and behavioural. The main contribution of this paper are new Microformat and Microdata schemas for describing 3D web components and 3D scenes with metadata and semantic properties. The proposed schemas may be combined with X3D, a well-established 3D content description standard. Thanks to the use of the standardized solutions, the presented approach facilitates widespread dissemination of 3D content for use in a variety of multimedia applications on the web.