The GRAVITATE project launched in June 2015 with the aim of creating a set of software tools that will allow archaeologists and curators to reconstruct shattered or broken cultural objects, to identify and re-unify parts of a cultural object that has been separated across collections and to recognise associations between cultural artefacts that will allow new knowledge and improve understanding of past societies.
SALAMIS Statue fragment: Rights – CYI STARC
The approach will use 3-D scanning enabling geometrical feature extraction and matching on the one hand, and semantic annotation and matching on the other. The integration of these approaches into a single decision support platform, with a full suite of visualisation tools will provide a unique resource for the cultural heritage research community.
GRAVITATE is building its research on a challenging case-study: fragments of monumental terracotta statues from Salamis, Cyprus, dating to around 650 – 600 B.C.E., dispersed in museums in Cyprus, the UK, France and Australia.
The partners include the Cyprus Institute, the British Museum, the IT Innovation Centre based at the University of Southampton, the University van Amsterdam, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR-IMATI) and the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion).
Project website: http://gravitate-project.eu/