Volunteers work together to create 3D virtual models of cultural artifacts destroyed by Islamic State militants

In February, Islamic State militants ransacked the central museum in Mosul, Iraq. Priceless cultural artifacts, many of which were thousands of years old, were destroyed in action that has been described by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a “cultural tragedy”.

Project Mosul is a volunteer initiative that aims to develop virtual models of the lost artifacts. The project uses crowdsourced images to virtually recreate the artifacts as 3D objects using the latest in photogrammetry techniques. These 3D representations will then be presented in an online museum where the data will be freely accessible to the public.

The initiators of Project Mosul are fellows of the European Union Marie Curie programme’s ‘Initial Training Network for Digital Cultural Heritage’ (ITN-DCH). This initial team is being joined daily by volunteers from around the world, with contributors still being sought for a variety of tasks: sourcing of data, sorting of uploaded images, masking of images, coding/web development, administration, and processing of photogrammetric models.

Project Mosul is working closely together with other organizations, including the local management of the Mosul Museum and initiatives such as the European 4D-Ch-World project and the digital library Europeana.

Find out more about these ongoing efforts on the Project Mosul website.

-- Andrew Purcell