An approach to semi-automatic semantic annotation on Web3D scenes based on an ontology framework

The recent years have witnessed a rapid development in virtual reality technology and computer aided design, which accompanied by a vast amount of 3D content springing up from various domains, has given rise to an emerging need for methods by which they can be efficiently annotated before being searched and retrieved. In this paper a new approach to semantic annotation on 3D content is proposed. In this approach, much of the manual work on annotation is replaced with a semi-automatic process based on prior gathering of domain expertise. The geometric properties of objects and their spatial relationships are first automatically extracted and associated with a general ontology, the result of which is then matched against a set of user-defined rules to create annotations represented in an application ontology. The approach is Web3D oriented so that it can take advantage of features of X3D format. It will be shown using a prototype system how this approach can succeed in accelerating the annotation process.