Pure3d

About

Pure3D is an app for authoring and publishing 3D editions.

It is the outcome of the Pure3D project led by Susan Schreibman and Costas Papadopoulos at Maastricht University, Netherlands.

Pure3D is hosted on CLARIAH infrastructure, managed from KNAW/HuC.

Contributors

• Kelly Schoueri (Maastricht)
  • key user, source of requirements
• MM (HuC) technical oversight
• VD (HuC) guidance for deployment on Kubernetes
• DH (HuC) support with the Kubernetes deployment
• LW (HuC) support with the backup solution
• Bas Doppen (HuC) styling
• Jamie Cope (Smithsonian) support for handling the Voyager 3D web viewer
• Dirk Roorda (HuC) architecture and most of the code

Components

Pure3D consists of two parts:

• (A) an authoring app, where users can create 3D editions and publish them;
• (P) a publishing app, showing the published editions as static web pages.

Both parts make use of the Smithsonian Voyager as 3D-viewer for the web with facilities for enrichments and annotations.

For more detail, see architecture.

Manual

There is a concise manual for admin/owners of the Pure3D system here.

Deployment

Pure3D is deployed on a Kubernetes cluster for CLARIAH at the HuC. The important thing to know is that the P and A app have their own deployments with their own pods and containers. They can run independently. So, if A fails for some reason, P happily prods along, and vice versa.

This whole setup is duplicated into a production cluster and a development cluster. In the production cluster there is an extra deployment that takes care of an incremental backup with a retention of 30 days.

For more information on the set up you need to have a VPN connection to the HuC institute and then you can follow this link.

Technical documentation

There is a lot of documentation in the Python docstrings of the authoring app which is the app that contains all the business logic.

History

• 2024-05-16 Pure3D went in production

Earlier

A lot has been discussed, many experiments have been carried out, great whishes have been expressed. It is still visible in a previous repo.

Missing bits

Not everything that we had in mind has been implemented so far. There is much room for improvements and further development:

• The layout of the authoring app is unpolished and primitive. It should look more like the layout of the publishing app.

• The handling of metadata is not sophisticated: just a few Dublin Core fields with unconstrained content.

• Search has not been implemented, not in the authoring app and not in the publishing app.

• Pre-flight checks for publication are basic: checks for broken links and unreferenced files. It should also check for completeness of metadata.

• No attempt for persistent identifiers has been made; we do have stable urls for published editions: https://editions.pure3d.eu/project/p/edition/e where p and e are the project and edition numbers, which start at 1. See also cool uris.

• A 3D dataset is more than a 3D model with annotations: there is also paradata or supplementary material; Pure3D does not manage such data.

• Pure3D is currently tied to the Voyager 3D Viewer, but it is desirable to be able to support more viewers. Even better would it be if editions made for one viewer, could be consumed by another viewer.