MorphoSource is a publicly accessible 3D data repository that enables museums, researchers, and scholars to upload, curate, and share 3D and 2D media representing physical objects of scholarly importance that can be found, viewed, and downloaded by other subject experts, educators, and the public. As a data curation and discovery resource, MorphoSource has strong and deep support for 3D media types and file formats, including 3D models with texture and color, computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) volumetric data image stacks, photogrammetry raw image series, serial section imagery, and others. The repository also supports 2D images and video. The vast majority of media archived on MorphoSource represent physical objects from natural history, cultural heritage, and scientific subject domains. MorphoSource supports extensive metadata for both media and physical objects that allows full curation, documentation, and communication of the sometimes complex imaging and processing workflows that produce derived 3D data. Media on MorphoSource are contributed to the repository by a community of contributors ranging from individual researchers to entire museums or institutions, and contributors are supported by nuanced tools to describe reuse guidelines and to only allow types of data access the contributor prefers for their particular use case. If you are a member of the MorphoSource community or would like to learn more about us, we recommend you check out our MorphoSource Community Resources repository.
This organization hosts repositories created by or used by our team. The central web application that powers MorphoSource is also located in this organization, but it is private for now. However, we are very willing to collaborate and share access to this code with academic colleagues and other interested parties under the terms of a limited non-commercial testing license. We can also help groups and institutions set up and host their own instance of the MorphoSource application software for archiving and curating locally-held 3D and 2D media representing physical objects. Please get in contact with us to discuss further.
We also have some repositories related to MorphoSource not located in this organization. Of particular importance is Aleph, our open source web 3D object viewer and annotation/measurement tool that supports 3D models and CT/MRI image stacks.
Our team participates in many different working groups, technology initatives, and digital infrastructure communities. These are just some of the groups we work with:
MorphoSource exists through the support of Duke University, the National Science Foundation, and many others. We are also grateful to Scout APM for their support in providing full-stack application performance monitoring that underpins the repository web application.
