Proposal of metadata schema for capturing and processing 3D models in an archaeological context

The management of cultural heritage leads to the creation of digital files that contain representations of cultural heritage elements. Over the last few decades, a number of technologies designed for creating 3D models of objects or scenes have been developed, and the number of digitisation platforms has increased. Despite the dissemination of 3D models on these platforms, generally, the methodologies used appears to be undocumented and there is a lack of standards for providing metadata for creating 3D models. In this paper, a metadata schema for 3D models of archaeological objects is proposed, addressing the possible techniques used to create and process such models and considering that not all digital objects are the same, as they are produced in different ways and with different metrics and chromatic accuracies. Additionally, a core of the most crucial components is suggested to alleviate the difficulty of producing exhaustive metadata to represent the entire procedure.