Documenting the restoration process in 3D digital catalogues

Digital Heritage is an established area nowadays and has expanded in a lot of directions. One of those is related to the digitalisation of cultural objects; another one is related to digital libraries where the new digital content is organised, managed, and disseminated in a global networking. Among the media, 3D content proved to be a valid support to documentation, research and communication of Cultural Heritage (CH) and 3D catalogues have been developed in many project and initiatives. Oppositely, in the conservation field, digitalisation and digital archiving are still auxiliary instruments for the documentation of the processes and only recently the need of systematic documentation started to be a concern. In this paper, we describe the documentation phases of a typical restoration process and discuss the components to be defined and developed to leverage digital archiving in more advanced CH fields, such as archaeology. Finally, we propose 3D annotation as a powerful tool to document digital content with data and information referenced to the geometry, illustrating the potential in the conservation field.