Documentation

The documentation of the working steps, the decisions made in a reconstruction, the applied method, and the results form one of the cornerstones of scientific practice. Over the centuries, scientific publication established itself with fixed basic principles, such as verifiability of methods, objectivity, disclosure of sources, comprehensibility of argumentation, accessibility of results, accuracy, reliability, and uniformity [1]. In computer-aided, hypothetical 3D reconstruction of destroyed architecture, the application of the above basic principles faces an as yet unsolved challenge. The model creation process is rarely documented, and when it is, the documentation is usually not publicly available. The knowledge embedded in reconstructions, scientific interpretation, argumentation, and hypothesis, is in danger of being lost. Due to the lack of resources, diverse and rapidly developing software applications, modelling methods and types, no application-based method for documenting and publishing 3D models has been established. Three decades into the spread of computer-assisted 3D visualization in the research and mediation of cultural heritage, discussion of the question of what and how to document has intensified. The Internet as a publication venue seems to make sense to most. Web-based documentation requires technical infrastructures and services as well as defined scientific methods for comprehensible modeling and sustainable provision. The following chapter is dedicated to describing and clarifying these developments.