Data Management Challenges for Internet-scale 3D Search Engines

This paper describes some of the major challenges encountered by Physna Inc. in developing an internet-scale search engine for three-dimensional (3D) models. The discussion focuses on the most significant data management issues in this domain, including model acquisition, diversity of file formats, shape retrieval, intellectual property, the legality of web crawling, and trustworthy computing. The paper gives an overview of these topics, as well as some of the general design choices that were made in the course of building the Thangs search engine. While numerous works have been published on the topic of algorithms for 3D similarity search, this paper is the first to discuss the real-world challenges that arise in building a practical, internet-scale, 3D search engine.