Guidelines for the management of cultural heritage using 3d models for the insertion of heterogeneous data

Résumé

The Management of Cultural Heritage (MCH) is a very complex operation aimed at protecting the physical integrity of Cultural Heritage assets, while promoting their historical value and development of tourism industry. Composed by distinct phases (documentation, intervention, monitoring and use), MCH implies a great effort for the project manager to coordinate the interactions among very different professional figures. In recent years, the use of digital technologies has become an essential part of the MCH delicate process, from early documentation to late intervention phases. The most commonly used methodologies for digital data acquisition, such as terrestrial laser scanning and digital photogrammetry, have become common practice in a broad range of professional activities. On the contrary, the use of 3D models for MCH is still limited to few academic research to date, often lacking continuity and wide application after the end of specific projects. Furthermore, very few supra-national standard guidelines regulating their use are available to date. As a consequence, the operator who decides to use a 3D model as a basis for management is faced with the scarcity and fragmentation of standards and guidelines. Moreover, the lack of standard on quality of acquired data and digital products negatively influences the interaction between the academic research sector, the managers and the professional world. The focus is on the use of 3D models as a valid support tool in the MCH process, highlighting their advantages in all the distinct phases of the management. As an example, 3D data can constitute themselves the basis for the digital database, gathering all available information concerning a Cultural Heritage site, exploitable for restoration works or for scientific dissemination. In particular, the aim of this PhD research is to develop guidelines to produce 3D models for MCH, with the purpose to efficiently entry, store and manage digital data. The here provided guidelines investigate every aspect of the process leading from data acquisition to cataloguing and archiving, processing and creation of a simplified information system. Each recommendation guides the user through the management of digital data, by adapting to his/her level of knowledge with respect to digital technologies and methodologies. In this way, the manager can efficiently use 3D models in MCH projects. In order to elaborate guidelines that could be suitable for as many typologies of Cultural Heritage as possible an international approach was chosen, developing the thesis in joint supervision under the University of Bologna and the Universitat Politècnica de València. We decided to apply state-of-the-art technologies and methodologies to a variety of case studies. The main ones are the early Christian monuments of Ravenna (Italy) belonging to the UNESCO World Heritage List, and a small neogothic chapel located in Castellón de la Plana (Spain). The fruitful collaboration between two different countries allowed an invaluable exchange of MCH expertise and, more broadly, contributed to the elaboration of standardized and universally applicable MCH guidelines that will allow a better interaction between managers, the academic research world and the professional one. The investigation, by highlighting the problems inherent to the MCH, made it possible to identify the main open issues that need to be explored in future lines of research, such as the application of standards to a large number of cultural assets in an iterative, continuous and automatic way, in order to perfecting the standards; the search for automatic classification of raw data; the processing of collected data for the creation of relations, strategies and methods for the classification, integration and optimisation of heterogeneous data.