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Digital Presentation and Preservation of Cultural and Scientific Heritage, (5), p. 331-336, 2015

DOI: 10.55630/dipp.2015.5.30

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Using Document Store for 3D Virtual Collections

Journal article published in 2015 by Emanuela Mitreva, Vladimir Georgiev
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

This paper describes the latest improvements to a recently developed online environment for managing virtual collections of 3D objects. As part of that effort we introduced a document-oriented NoSQL layer for storing the data describing the 3D objects and collections, provided by the MongoDB engine. This technology has many advantages for describing the type of data and metadata used in our application, which are also valid for and can be applied to the field of digital libraries in general. 1 Introduction In our previous work [1] we introduced the development of a 3D environment that can be used for making collections of objects for virtual museums and sharing those collections online. The system can be used in many different scenarios-from allowing the user to show a single big object to creating a collection of multiple smaller objects. It is a complete environment for creating, editing, publishing, unpublishing and deleting virtual collections, which can be examined in the customers web browser from a first-person perspective using the keyboard and the mouse. One important area of improvement for the initial version of the application that we identified, was how the information for the objects and the collections, including how the object can be positioned and/or visualized, will be stored more efficiently. This includes the ability to store objects of all kinds, having any types of properties, defined on them in any structure, as well as being more scalable and reliable. Another thing we needed to do was to extend the structure of the objects to hold not only information about how they should be positioned in a collection, but also historical information about the specific object. Those two tasks are related to each other, because the information needed for the objects limits the possible types of databases that can be used. The initial version of our application uses the SQLite relational database engine for storing the information. Because the structure of the object data was initially static and predefined, to support new properties in the future we would need changes in the DB schema and the code and in the application. Another important problem was scalability, which is a crucial feature of a digital library web application used for storing large amounts of real-life data.