Compiling 3D models of European heritage from user domain XML

Europe has a unique heritage and culture that is largely hidden from its young people. New information and communication technologies present an opportunity to involve the young people of Europe in discovering this heritage and presenting it to others in an exciting, dynamic way. This paper describes early work on the INHERIT project which involves the development of a set of tools, data and structures to build and manage historical and three-dimensional models. This enables school and college students to share in creating and exploring distributed simulations of dynamic aspects of history, geography, economics, politics and other subjects closely associated with European citizenship. With the tools developed, it is envisaged that school pupils are able to add, for example, landscape, buildings, avatars and a range of other objects, to a virtual world that models the heritage of Europe. The tools are based upon XML technologies to structure and distribute data and X3D or VRML to display that three-dimensional data.