We describe a system which addresses all the processes involved in digitally acquiring, modelling, storing, manipulating and creating virtual exhibitions from 3D museum artefacts. More specifically, we examine the significance of metadata in enabling and supporting all of these processes and describe the extensive facilities provided for authoring, maintaining and managing metadata. The development of the system has been heavily influenced by factors relating to interoperability, standards, museum best practice and feedback from two museum pilot sites. Finally, we briefly consider the system in the wider context of applications such at virtual learning environments (VLEs) and distributed repositories of archives.

The part of the Internet of Things composed of devices that directly interact with users has grown considerably in the past years. With new smartphones, tablets and other Internet-enabled devices that appear on the market, this trend is still increasing. However, existing application development processes and tools, designed for single device applications, do not allow developers to fully and efficiently address this opportunity. Applications are developed for a particular type of devices or a particular programming platform. This limits the number of potential users and makes it difficult to seamlessly use an application on multiple devices owned by users. To take full advantage of the Internet of Things, applications should be able to run on any device-they should be ubiquitous. In this paper, we present a concept of Device-Independent Architecture, which provides separation of applications from devices and facilitates development of device-independent applications. Additionally, the separation introduced by the DeviceIndependent Architecture enables implementation of multidevice scenarios where a single application employs multiple devices at the same time. The experiment described in the paper proves that such device-independent applications indeed may be used on any suitable device-they have a chance to become ubiquitous.

The problem of metadata for interactive 3D objects has appeared very recently. It is significant due to the growing demand for interactive applications of 3D technologies. Time required to prepare such applications depends strongly on availability of reusable interactive 3D objects. Easy access to such objects can be increased by search solutions that cover not only object geometry and semantics but also object interactions. However, existing metadata standards provide tools only for general, technical and semantic descriptions of objects. The missing elements of object description solution are metadata of object interactions and an optimized query language. In our previous research we have developed an extensible solution for describing interactions of 3D objects. In this paper, we present the second missing element, a specification of a special query language that enables efficient usage of the interaction metadata.

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ABSTRACT3D modeling is extensively used in many engineering fields, notably in architecture. 3D models of new buildings are built with 3D objects taken from object libraries provided by producers of real objects (i.e. windows, lifts, etc). Such libraries can also include interactive 3D objects that are not only static geometrical representations, but also behave like their real counterparts. Searching for such interactive object in a large library requires object metadata describing object interaction properties. Existing metadata standards are not sufficient for describing object interactions. In this paper a new solution for interactions metadata is presented. The new solution is composed of concepts and tools for modeling an interaction, describing different aspects of an interaction, building XML documents with interaction metadata and using information contained in these documents to search specific objects. The usage of all those concepts and tools is presented in a detailed scenario from the field of architectural modeling.

Abstract. The problem of integrating heterogeneous back-end platforms used in public administration has been widely addressed in a number of research and development projects. In such a complex and heterogeneous environment, application of the SOA paradigm can be particularly beneficial. However, in some application domains -such as the Building Control Administration -there is an additional requirement: integration of heterogeneous front-end platforms -including access through mobile devices. In this paper, a new method of creating adaptable mobile user interfaces for applications based on SOA services is described. In the adaptation process the displayed content is adjusted, the best way of presenting content is selected and interaction methods are adapted to the capabilities of the particular mobile device. Therefore, it is possible to easily make any service accessible on any mobile device -which is of great importance to the Building Control Administration surveyors that operate out of office, directly in the construction field.