GLTF Suitability for Digital Heritage 3D Assets

Digital Heritage, as a digitisation and dissemination process, involves collecting detailed data on tangible assets for preservation and knowledge sharing. However, the distribution of DCH 3D assets faces several challenges, mainly caused by a lack of standardisation, i.e. minimum quality requirements, metadatation and publishing formats. Adopting a FAIR approach could help in characterising such needed standards, emphasising open-source formats, documented production pipelines and accessibility of online repositories that would rely on Web3D-Optimised formats to allow hardware and software neutrality. This paper focuses, in particular, on the importance of choosing an appropriate 3D model interchange format for 3D assets belonging to DCH and subsequently proposes a critical review of the glTF format to prove its suitability to this need. GlTF's open design, its extensible structure, flexibility, interoperability, and rapid development, supported by a JSON-Based structure and compatibility by-design with WebGL, are highlighted. Finally, a simplified and coherent feature list for glTF is provided, mainly focusing on the glTF PBR-Based material system, on the mutual interrelations between the parameters and on aggregating the features currently described by the relatively sparse and technical documentation in a diverse, more Final User-Oriented taxonomy where is highlighted the contribution of each feature to the overall glTF suitability as an effective 3D assets interchange format for the Digital Heritage