ARIADNE visual media service: easy Web publishing of advanced visual media

This paper describes the design and development of a service for 'visual media' files. In the first phase of the ARIADNE project we reviewed the status of visual media resources (2D, RTI, 3D) in the archaeology domain, but there was possibility of publishing visual media resources on the web. To fill this gap we have designed a service aimed at providing easy and unsupervised publication on the web. The service provides a very easy interface (a simple web form) that allows the user to upload the visual media file; the data is then transformed in a web-compliant format, supporting multi-resolution encoding, compression, and progressive transmission. At the end of the data-processing phase the user receives an email containing the URL of the published asset (or, in case he/she wants to store the file locally, a .zip file). Specific browsers for the three types of media have also been developed, based on 3DHOP technology.