Seven Research Challenges of Generalized 3D Documents

The rapid evolution of information and communication technology has always been a source for challenging new research questions in computer science. The vision of the emerging research field of semantic 3D is to establish the notion of generalized 3D documents that are full members of the family of generalized documents. This means that access would be content-based rather than based on metadata. The purpose of this article is to highlight the research issues that impede the realization of this vision today. The seven research challenges include: (1) '3D data set' can have many meanings, (2) a sustainable 3D file format, (3) representation-independent stable 3D markup, (4) representation-independent 3D query operations, (5) documenting provenance and processing history, (6) consistency between shape and meaning, and (7) closing the semantic gap