GlTF suitability for Digital Heritage 3D assets @ Florence Heritech 2024, April 30th 2024

Presented at Florence Heritech 2024.Digital Heritage, as a digitisation and dissemination process, involves collecting detailed data on tangibleassets for preservation and knowledge sharing. However, the distribution of DH 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 formatsto allow hardware and software neutrality. This paper focuses, in particular, on the importance of choosing anappropriate 3D model interchange format for 3D assets belonging to DH and subsequently proposes a critical reviewof 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 withWebGL, are highlighted. Finally, a simplified and coherent feature list for glTF is provided, mainly focusing on theglTF PBR-Based material system, on the mutual interrelations between the parameters and on aggregating the featurescurrently described by the relatively sparse and technical documentation in a diverse, more Final User-Orientedtaxonomy where is highlighted the contribution of each feature to the overall glTF suitability as an effective 3D assetsinterchange format for the Digital Heritage.Acknowledgments. This work has been partially funded by Project PE 0000020 CHANGES - CUP B53C22003780006, NRPMission 4 Component 2 Investment 1.3, Funded by the European Union - NextGenerationEU"Keywords: glTF, Digital Heritage, FAIR.