A search engine for 3D models of museum artefacts

The National Museum of Ireland has about 5 million artifacts distributed across different physical locations. Essentially this means that only small fraction of these are accessible to the public at any time. Digital Libraries support the 3D browsing and retrieval of cultural museum artefacts and offer a potential solution to this problem. This paper describes a final year project where the objective was to build a search engine that: (1) could operate over a digital library storing digitized 3D model representations of objects, and (2) could be integrated with the existing DigiFact system architecture based in CDVP at DCU.