174 
Instruments of raster processing (photo-editing software) are 
used in order to realise local matching between texture-mapped 
surfaces and the ones reconstructed through synthetic materials, 
because of hidden or missing elements. 
Software for semi-automatic conversion from raster to vector is 
spreading as an additional module of scanning packages and/or 
hybrid Cad environments. 
Data processing requested for realistic and interactive 
visualisation always demands the availability of hardware 
platforms with good resources and performances, such as the 
latest generation of Pentium II. 
2. THE DOCUMENTATION INSIDE INTERNET - 
INTRANET WEBS 
With no doubt, Internet technology has a deep impact on 
today's activities. Internet network supplies a series of various 
functions, among which the World Wide Web is the more 
recent and spreading service, not only reference place in 
organisations around the world, but also strategic tool for 
marketing and cultural promotion. 
It provides a set of interactive documents (pages) and the 
possibility to manage them; the WWW is based on these 
"pages" which include a combination of texts, images, audio 
modules, animations and "links". In order to explore the web 
sites, it is sufficient to go from one page to another by simply 
clicking the mouse on the links contained inside texts or 
graphics. 
The documents are written in HTML language (files *.htm), the 
standard for hypertextual document (texts or images which 
include associative links to other information). 
3D scenes, realised in VRML graphical language (Tittel et al„ 
1997) (files *.wrl, i.e. world), can be included to describe 
interactive simulations of "virtual worlds" connected in the 
WWW resources through a visualisation interface, i.e. a 
browser. Technical specifications of language VRML were 
written in 1994 from G. Bell (Silicon Graphics), A. Parisi 
(Interview software) and M. Pesce (co-ordinator of the group); 
the current version is said 97. 
A web site corresponds to an Internet address and it is the place 
dedicated to an argument or to a specific data transmission 
function. It has a home page, the page of highest level that has a 
primary role for each site presentation, because it is 
automatically shown when the user approaches the WWW. 
The WWW is based on a client-server architecture that consists 
of computers receiving information from a local "provider". 
Graphical information particularly allows 2D or 3D interactive 
explorations and the connection to other documents of an 
archive. 
Representation of objects is managed through "interactive 
images", in addition to the "static" ones. They are bitmap (GIF 
8 bit format, with 256 colours, or 24 bit compressed JPEG, with 
beyond 16 million colours) with selectable zones, called 
"sensitive areas or points", to which hypertextual links can be 
assigned. 
These areas (named also hot spots) are associated to interesting 
elements of the object and the browser points them out 
whenever the mouse cursor gets a different shape (namely a 
hand). 
This way, it is produced a "sensitive" 2D document, in relation 
to the employment of an orthogonalised image (files GIF or 
JPG), or a "sensitive" spatial visualisation, according to the 
creation of 3D scenes in VRML format. 
Zoom Rotate Pan 
Fig. 1 - Main controls on the Cosmo Player dashboard.