After the AIM@SHAPE project, the use of semantics
attracted the research community, spurring
the development of smarter tools to analyze
shapes. An increasing number of papers in the
computer graphics communities now mention the
term semantics. Symmetries, repeating patterns,
skeletonizing, and so on have been proposed over
the years as instruments to sort out low-level geometric
data into more structured and semanticsoriented
representations of 3D models. Shapes
started to be analyzed not only as single objects,
but also as instances within an object category,
giving raise to the co-analysis and co-segmentation
needed to understand and organize the variability
observed in shape categories. Recently, ever more
work points to bridging the gap between geometry/
structure and semantics, with various papers tackling
the recognition of object functionality,8
modeling
with natural language modifiers,9
and even
the affordance analysis of objects in their interactions
with humans.1