Computer scientists at the University of Southampton are developing a database that will let museum curators and researchers view 3D images of historical artefacts and works of art online.

The project, known as Sculpteur, will store written information, 2D and 3D images and models, video recordings and photographs so that they can be studied from anywhere in the world.

Dr Paul Lewis, one of the database developers, explained that until now little work has been done on methods of retrieving information from artefact databases using visual data.

"Most existing databases work on finding keywords to retrieve documents, records or images," he said.

The new database will allow researchers to present an image as a query and say: 'Find me more images like this one'.

Sculpteur builds on image search and retrieval techniques developed for a previous project entitled Artiste (www.artisteweb.org), which focused on 2D images.

Artiste enabled the use of non-standard, multi-lingual queries across different image collections. For example, the term 'papillon' can be used to find images of butterfly paintings in both the Louvre and the National Gallery.

Sculpteur will extend this work using the latest semantic web technology, which may one day simplify all web searches by taking account not just of the words used but the meaning of those words.