Chiara Eva Catalano

A product design ontology for enhancing shape processing in design workflows

Effective and efficient information management and knowledge sharing has become an essential part of more and more professional tasks in the Product Development Process. Among the various Knowledge Management technologies, ontologies offer new possibilities for representing, handling and retrieving product related knowledge, and for online collaboration. We conceived a Product Design Ontology (PDO) which especially addresses researchers in industrial product design and engineering analysis who need to share shape data and to develop software tools. In particular, we formalised the task-specific information associated to a shape, and the functionality and usage of shape processing methods in specific tasks of the design workflow. The PDO, thanks to the ontology-driven metadata on shapes and tools, may be also useful in industry on the one hand for training and for retrieving shape-related information, on the other hand for supporting benchmarking of processing tools and gathering the knowledge about shape processing workflows.

Semantic 3D Media and Content: Semantics and 3D media: Current issues and perspectives

3D digital content has become popular as emerging media that can be created, edited and shared by users in a collaborative environment, likewise images and videos. The popularity of 3D media is not confined to the leisure sphere but it increased in many fields ranging from the entertainment market to the industrial product modelling, to health, biology, art, virtual tourism, and more. While problems related to the representation of the geometry of 3D shapes have been largely solved by the CG community, tools for coding, extracting, sharing, and retrieving the semantic content of 3D media are still far from satisfactory: interdisciplinary research efforts are needed to foster the development of the 3D Internet and its applications. The purpose of this paper is thus motivating research in this direction, presenting our vision of the future and, without offering any off-the-shelf solution, giving an overview of the various aspects of semantics required to optimise tasks and processes related to 3D content in different application domains. We identified four grand challenges which synthesise the open issues in common to the considered fields and represent a roadmap towards semantic 3D media.

Exploiting 3d part-based analysis, description and indexing to support medical applications

Multi-modality is crucial to handle knowledge, medical data and patient-specific information in an integrated fashion: in the course of their work, indeed, clinicians analyze a large amount of information about interrelated layers such as anatomy, kinematics, dynamics, mechanics and physiology. Much of the information related to these levels is intrinsically 3D and we believe that the adoption of 3D part-based annotation and content-based indexing will open up new ways to integrate and interact with medical information. In this paper, we will focus the attention on content-based analysis of 3D medical data and discuss related issues and trends, based on two software tools: the ShapeAnnotator and RheumaSCORE. In the illustrative scenario of the Rheumatoid Arthritis we will provide hints for even more informative Computer Aided Diagnosis systems for clinical support.

A framework for the automatic annotation of car aesthetics

The design of a new car is guided by a set of directives indicating the target market, specific engineering, and aesthetic constraints, which may also include the preservation of the company brand identity or the restyling of products already on the market. When creating a new product, designers usually evaluate other existing products to find sources of inspiration or to possibly reuse successful solutions. In the perspective of an optimized styling workflow, great benefit could be derived from the possibility of easily retrieving the related documentation and existing digital models both from internal and external repositories. In fact, the rapid growth of resources on the Web and the widespread adoption of computer-assisted design tools have made available huge amounts of data, the utilization of which could be improved by using more selective retrieval methods. In particular, the retrieval of aesthetic elements may help designers to create digital models conforming to specific styling properties more efficiently. The aim of our research is the definition of a framework that supports (semi)automatic extraction of semantic data from three-dimensional models and other multimedia data to allow car designers to reuse knowledge and design solutions within the styling department. The first objective is then to capture and structure the explicit and implicit elements contributing to the definition of car aesthetics, which can be realistically tackled through computational models and methods. The second step is the definition of a system architecture that is able to transfer such semantic evaluation through the automatic annotation of car models.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Serious Games for Cultural Awareness: The Icura User Study

There is an increasing awareness about the potential of serious games for education and training in many disciplines. However, research still witnesses a lack of methodologies, guidelines and best practices on how to develop effective serious games and how to integrate them in the actual learning and training processes. This process of integration heavily depends on providing and spreading evidence of the effectiveness of serious games This paper reports a user study to evaluate the effectiveness of Icura, a serious game about Japanese culture and etiquette. The evaluation methodology extends the set of instruments used in previous studies by evaluating the effects of the game on raising awareness, by avoiding the selective attention bias and by assessing the medium-term retention. With this research we aim to provide a handy toolkit for evaluating the effectiveness a serious games for cultural awareness and heritage.

Knowledge-Based Representation Of 3D Media

In recent years, 3D media have become more and more widespread and have been made available in numerous online repositories. A systematic and formal approach for representing and organizing shape-related information is needed to share 3D media, to communicate the knowledge associated to shape modeling processes and to facilitate its reuse in useful cross-domain usage scenarios. In this paper we present an initial attempt to formalize an ontology for digital shapes, called the Common Shape Ontology (CSO). We discuss about the rationale, the requirements and the scope of this ontology, we present in detail its structure and describe the most relevant choices related to its development. Finally, we show how the CSO conceptualization is used in domain-specific application scenarios.

Semantic annotation of 3D anatomical models to support diagnosis and follow-up analysis of musculoskeletal pathologies.

PurposeWhile 3D patient-specific digital models are currently available, thanks to advanced medical acquisition devices, there is still a long way to go before these models can be used in clinical practice. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how 3D patient-specific models of anatomical parts can be analysed and documented accurately with morphological information extracted automatically from the data. Part-based semantic annotation of 3D anatomical models is discussed as a basic approach for sharing and reusing knowledge among clinicians for next-generation CAD-assisted diagnosis and treatments.MethodsWe have developed (1) basic services for the analysis of 3D anatomical models and (2) a methodology for the enrichment of such models with relevant descriptions and attributes, which reflect the parameters of interest for medical investigations. The proposed semantic annotation is ontology-driven and includes both descriptive and quantitative labelling. Most importantly, the developed methodology permits to identify and annotate also parts-of-relevance of anatomical entities.ResultsThe computational tools for the automatic computation of qualitative and quantitative parameters have been integrated in a prototype system, the SemAnatomy3D framework, which demonstrates the functionalities needed to support effective annotation of 3D patient-specific models. From the first evaluation, SemAnatomy3D appears as an effective tool for clinical data analysis and opens new ways to support clinical diagnosis.ConclusionsThe SemAnatomy3D framework integrates several functionalities for 3D part-based annotation. The idea has been presented and discussed for the case study of rheumatoid arthritis of carpal bones; however, the framework can be extended to support similar annotations in different clinical applications.

Accessing and Representing Knowledge in the Medical Field: Visual and Lexical Modalities

In the era of digitalization a large amount of medical data is produced, and many activities spanning from diagnosis to simulation and from assisted surgery to patient-specific treatment and follow-up are carried out with the support of software tools. Computer-aided medicine can undoubtedly take advantage of a structured organization of the digital data involved, through the aid of knowledge and visualization technologies. In this chapter, we will survey recent approaches to the access and presentation of medical data in order to exemplify how knowledge-driven data organization may support medical activities. These approaches will be analyzed paying special attention to two different trends: we will show their potential in providing a visual effective reference and their capability of exploiting shared and structured vocabularies. Perspectives on the integration of these two trends will also be presented.

GRAVITATE: geometric and semantic matching for cultural heritage artefacts

The GRAVITATE project is developing techniques that bring together geometric and semantic data analysis to provide a new and more effective method of re-associating, reassembling or reunifying cultural objects that have been broken or dispersed over time. The project is driven by the needs of archaeological institutes, and the techniques are exemplified by their application to a collection of several hundred 3D-scanned fragments of large-scale terracotta statues from Salamis, Cyprus. The integration of geometrical feature extraction and matching with semantic annotation and matching into a single decision support platform will lead to more accurate reconstructions of artefacts and greater insights into history. In this paper we describe the project and its objectives, then we describe the progress made to date towards achieving those objectives: describing the datasets, requirements and analysing the state of the art. We follow this with an overview of the architecture of the integrated decision support platform and the first realisation of the user dashboard. The paper concludes with a description of the continuing work being undertaken to deliver a workable system to cultural heritage curators and researchers.

Semantics-driven annotation of patient-specific 3D data: a step to assist diagnosis and treatment of rheumatoid arthritis

In the digital era, patient-specific 3D models (3D-PSMs) are becoming increasingly relevant in computer-assisted diagnosis, surgery training on digital models, or implant design. While advanced imaging and reconstruction techniques can create accurate and detailed 3D models of patients’ anatomy, software tools that are able to fully exploit the potential of 3D-PSMs are still far from being satisfactory. In particular, there is still a lack of integrated approaches for extracting, coding, sharing and retrieving medically relevant information from 3D-PSMs and use it concretely as a support to diagnosis and treatment. In this article, we propose the SemAnatomy3D framework, which demonstrates how the ontology-driven annotation of 3D-PSMs and of their anatomically relevant features (parts of relevance) can assist clinicians to document more effectively pathologies and their evolution. We exemplify the idea in the context of the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis of the hand district, and show how feature extraction tools and semantic 3D annotation can provide a rich characterization of anatomical landmarks (e.g., articular facets, prominent features, ligament attachments) and pathological markers (erosions, bone loss). The core contributions are an ontology-driven part-based annotation method for the 3D-PSMs and a novel automatic localization of erosion and quantification of the OMERACT RAMRIS erosion score. Finally, our results have been compared against a medical ground truth.