GRAVITATE: Geometric and semantic matching for cultural heritage artefacts

The GRAVITATE project is developing techniques that bring together geometric and semantic data analysis to provide a new and more effective method of re-associating, reassembling or reunifying cultural objects that have been broken or dispersed over time. The project is driven by the needs of archaeological institutes, and the techniques are exemplified by their application to a collection of several hundred 3D-scanned fragments of large-scale terracotta statues from Salamis, Cyprus. The integration of geometrical feature extraction and matching with semantic annotation and matching into a single decision support platform will lead to more accurate reconstructions of artefacts and greater insights into history. In this paper we describe the project and its objectives, then we describe the progress made to date towards achieving those objectives: describing the datasets, requirements and analysing the state of the art. We follow this with an overview of the architecture of the integrated decision support platform and the first realisation of the user dashboard. The paper concludes with a description of the continuing work being undertaken to deliver a workable system to cultural heritage curators and researchers.