An open workflow for the digitisation of built heritage

Cursi S., Martinelli L., Calvano M., Calcerano F., Cessari L., Gigliarelli E.

HBIM  Built Heritage  Knowledge Modeling  Open Data 

Built heritage, in addition to being an element of cultural identity, is to be regarded as a source of inspiration and creativity for present and future generations. It is an ever-evolving repository of knowledge about culture and society, which, due to its importance and uniqueness, must be preserved. Historical buildings are the expression of the traditions and techniques of people and societies that made them and thus must be studied and documented to prevent loss or damage, also ensuring that any restoration, maintenance, and reuse activities are undertaken consciously. To date, existing digital methods are not always appropriate for the built heritage sector. At the same time, older domain experts and physical textual archives collected a large amount of unique knowledge which is only partially transferred to digital resources. Examples are historical construction techniques, terminology for damage pathologies and heritage elements, etc. Transferring this knowledge into new applications and open data spaces could prevent its loss and improve its sharing. In recent years, the digitalisation of existing knowledge has been widely debated; there are currently many digital resources available to improve modeling capabilities and solve complex problems in well-defined subject areas of analysis, conservation and restoration. However, this research faces the scattering of a wide variety of digital data, that is distributed in numerous independent archives and possesses a great heterogeneity in the type of media and formats used. Among them, the gradual introduction of Building Information Modelling in the field of built heritage - also referred to as Heritage BIM - HBIM - has only partially mitigated the criticality; especially on aspects concerning representation through standard formats, transmission, and consistency of modeled data, especially in open collaborative formats and platforms. A selection of multiple technologies should be made on a case by case basis. To solve some of the aforementioned problems, this paper proposes an innovative workflow to integrate technologies related to Open Data, Semantic Web, Linked Data, and HBIM , to manage all the knowledge collected, used and shared for the conservation and enhancement of historical buildings in a collaborative platform, including .geometric-constructive aspects from direct analysis up to intangible data from indirect sources and related to traditions and knowledge of arts and crafts. Such an approach, and the models based on it, would support the ideal collaborative space for the management of open built heritage data, in the framework of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC); thus, they can take on a richer meaning and value, becoming an integral part of an information network that enables their correlation with different disciplines. The adoption of this open data space workflow, within EOSC, will allow experts and stakeholders in the field to gather the knowledge about construction techniques, spread in different resources around the world. This will enable interdisciplinary exchange and interoperability, as well as promote a culture of data sharing on the permanence and mutations of architectural typologies built over the centuries in Europe, helping to foster a deeper engagement of heritage in modern society.

Source: DARIAH Annual Event 2023: Cultural Heritage Data as Humanities Research Data?, Budapest, 7-9/6/2023