Heriverse: a web environment for publishing 3D heritage studies together with their reasoning

Heriverse (Heritage Science Metaverse) is an open-source web platform for publishing a 3D study of a heritage context together with the reasoning that supports it. A Heriverse scene is not a model with a caption: it is the knowledge graph of the study, in which every stratigraphic or reconstructive unit, every epoch, every source and every 3D representation is a node, and the 3D scene is the way into that graph. Visitors move through the epochs of a site, click on any part of a reconstruction and reach the units, documents and arguments behind it, on a desktop, a mobile device or a virtual reality headset. Authors build and enrich the graph in a web editor, drawing 3D models, images and documents from a shelf of resources, and can work in shared sessions. Heriverse grew out of the Extended Matrix research line at CNR-ISPC, as the web successor of the EMviq viewer; it was designed there and developed by 3D Research Srl on commission of CNR-ISPC as a vertical pilot of the Italian research infrastructure project H2IOSC; it runs on the ATON framework. This preprint describes the platform as it stands at version 1.5, aligned with version 1.5 of the Extended Matrix data model, and documents, through dates that can be checked in public sources, the genesis of the platform and of the two parts of the model it reads: the JSON interchange of the EM graph (em.json) and the representation models. Development continues within the Horizon Europe project StratiGraph.