An Online Dissemination Workflow for the Scientific Process in CH through Semantic 3D: EMtools and EMviq Open Source Tools
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The Abstract and Introduction should make it clear that the article describes development in two components, EMTools and EMviq. It should be mentioned that EMTools is a Blender addon. The abstract description of what can be achieved by employing EMTools ("...Its purpose is to facilitate the processes of semantic enrichment and source-based 3D modeling of cultural contexts...") should be included in the abstract. In their current state, both abstract and conclusion make it hard to decipher which of the described work is new, incremental, and which parts have been described before.
The purpose of individual and especially bulk citations are a sometimes unclear:
- In the related work, the extended matrix should be introduced more thoroughly instead of just citing 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. It is unclear to me why the basic EM concepts are in section 3.1 and not in 2. Assure that it is made clear what is actually referred to in a citation.
- Please also detail what citations 17, 18, 19, 20 each have to offer as a basis for this work. E.g., [17] might be enough as a detailed description of the ATON framework?
- Large parts of section 4.2 has already been described in [16] and in the article "Berto, S.; Demetrescu, E.; Fanini, B.; Bonetto, J.; Salemi, G. Analysis and Validation of the 3D Reconstructive Process through the Extended Matrix Framework of the Temple of the Roman Forum of Nora (Sardinia, CA). Environ. Sci. Proc. 2021, 10, 18. https://doi.org/10.3390/environsciproc2021010018". Instead of repeating, this should be cited and new developments should be made clearer.
- Please extend on the usage of the HTML5 summary and details elements. I'm pretty sure that very few readers are familiar with this.
Small typos, layout and corrections:
- Citation in line 134 is missing the page number and a space
- "see" should be consistently italic or normally typed
- The screenshots in Figure 3 should be scaled to exhibit the same readable font size
- Include links to the extendedmatrix.org homepage or maybe directly to the Github pages for the open source components.
Author Response
1note - The Abstract and Introduction should make it clear that the article describes development in two components, EMTools and EMviq. It should be mentioned that EMTools is a Blender add-on. The abstract description of what can be achieved by employing EMTools ("...Its purpose is to facilitate the processes of semantic enrichment and source-based 3D modeling of cultural contexts...") should be included in the abstract. In their current state, both abstract and conclusion make it hard to decipher which of the described work is new, incremental, and which parts have been described before.
1reply - the note was very helpful in being able to improve the article, which was thoroughly revised in light of the suggestions. It was made clearer in the abstract what the starting point of the article is what the objective is and what the innovative and incremental results were, both anticipating them in the abstract and summarising them organically in the conclusions.
2note - The purpose of individual and especially bulk citations are a sometimes unclear:
- In the related work, the extended matrix should be introduced more thoroughly instead of just citing 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. It is unclear to me why the basic EM concepts are in section 3.1 and not in 2. Assure that it is made clear what is actually referred to in a citation.
- Please also detail what citations 17, 18, 19, 20 each have to offer as a basis for this work. E.g., [17] might be enough as a detailed description of the ATON framework?
2reply -
⁃ All along the paper, citations have been better detailed, the basic concept of EM has been moved from section 3.1 to 2 and deeply revised to be more adherent to the goal of the paper; regarding citations 17,18,19,20 we better detailed single references and what they offer for or contribute to this specific work
3note - Large parts of section 4.2 has already been described in [16] and in the article "Berto, S.; Demetrescu, E.; Fanini, B.; Bonetto, J.; Salemi, G. Analysis and Validation of the 3D Reconstructive Process through the Extended Matrix Framework of the Temple of the Roman Forum of Nora (Sardinia, CA). Environ. Sci. Proc. 2021, 10, 18. https://doi.org/10.3390/environsciproc2021010018". Instead of repeating, this should be cited and new developments should be made clearer.
3reply - new developments regarding the inspection and presentation of the complete scientific paradata behind the virtual reconstruction process. It has been made clearer in the aforementioned section.
4note -
- Please extend on the usage of the HTML5 summary and details elements. I'm pretty sure that very few readers are familiar with this.
Small typos, layout and corrections:
- Citation in line 134 is missing the page number and a space - "see" should be consistently italic or normally typed - The screenshots in Figure 3 should be scaled to exhibit the same readable font size - Include links to the extendedmatrix.org homepage or maybe directly to the GitHub pages for the open source components.
4reply - the summary and details tags are now better explained. all the suggestions have been addressed, the GitHub pages are not explicitly cited but, instead, the Zenodo publications (that, in turn, point to the original GitHub repos) are cited.
Reviewer 2 Report
The article present a complete work-flow of transformation of the archaeological record into a virtual reconstructive hypothesis and to communicate this information to specialist and to the large audience. The article described in detail the software tools and methods used to realize their work.
The application of the open source tools EMtools and EMviq is really interesting and well described. I think it will be very useful for archeologist that want to communicate their work with 3D virtual recostruction.
I suggest to the author to implement the conclusion trying to better explain how their software contributes to improving what is the state of the art regarding the communication of archaeological data with 3D. Concerning this, I also suggest expanding the bibliography, which is a little too self-referential, with articles and works that give an international view of the subject they treat.
Author Response
1note - I suggest to the author to implement the conclusion trying to better explain how their software contributes to improving what is the state of the art regarding the communication of archaeological data with 3D.
1reply - The note was very useful to improve the impact of the paper: a series of statements now complete the contribution of this research to the community.
2note - Concerning this, I also suggest expanding the bibliography, which is a little too self-referential, with articles and works that give an international view of the subject they treat.
2reply - The paper has been deeply revised in how the sections are arranged and more citations to present a better state of the art at the international level have been provided.
