Semantic-Based Segmentation and Annotation of 3D Models

3D objects have become widely available and used in different application domains. Thus, it is becoming fundamental to use, integrate and develop techniques for extracting and maintaining their embedded knowledge. These techniques should be encapsulated in portable and intelligent systems able to semantically annotate the 3D object models in order to improve their usability and indexing, especially in innovative web cooperative environments. Lately, we are moving in this direction, with the definition and development of data structures, methods and interfaces for structuring and semantically annotating 3D complex models (and scenes) - even changing in time - according to ontology-driven metadata and following ontology-driven processes. Here, we concentrate on the tools for segmenting manifold 3D models and on the underline structural representation that we build and manipulate. We also describe the first prototype of an annotation tool which allows a hierarchical semantic-driven tagging of the segmented model and provides an interface from which the user can inspect and browse the entire segmentation graph.