Harvesting of Semantic Metadata from Distributed 3D Web Content

The paper presents a method of harvesting semantic metadata from distributed 3D web content. Distributed 3D content may be used for building complex VR/AR-based solutions for human-system interaction. Dependencies between 3D web content are typically more complex than dependencies between standard web pages as they may relate to different aspects of the content - spatial, temporal, structural, logical and behavioural. Building, searching and combining distributed 3D content may be improved by applying the Semantic Web approach. Semantic Web standards enable transformations of embedded semantic descriptions - unambiguously and inextricably linked with the described content - to separate semantic descriptions - intended for content that presents different semantic objects. However, these standards have been intended mostly for 2D web pages and not for 3D web content. The main contribution of this paper is a method of harvesting metadata from semantically described distributed X3D web content. The method conforms to well-established standards for describing both 3D content and semantics of resources, and it facilitates widespread creation, dissemination and reuse of content in a variety of applications on the web.