Today Digital Shapes (i.e. multi-dimensional media characterized by a visual appearance in a space of 2, 3, or more dimensions) have become widely available in different application domains and on the net, thus it is becoming fundamental to use, integrate and develop techniques for extracting and maintaining their explicit and implicit knowledge. These techniques should be encapsulated in intelligent systems able to semantically annotate the shapes, thus improving their usability and indexing, especially in innovative web cooperative environments.
The seminar will present research results in this field, with particular attention to the formalization of the semantics associated to digital shapes through the use of domain-specific ontologies and on tools and systems which analyse the digital shapes and extract ontology-driven metadata. Modelling the semantics of digital shapes constitutes, for example, a concrete step in developing an effective semantics-oriented search mechanism for 3D resources. Results related to a prototype (developed with the AIM@SHAPE Network of Excellence (EC-FP7)) of the Digital Shape Workbench (DSW) will be presented too.