SiSMI Project–Technologies for the Improvement of Safety and the Reconstruction of Historic Centres in the Seismic Area of Central Italy

The project SISMI-Tecnologie per il miglioramento della Sicurezza e la ricostruzione dei centri Storici in area sisMIca (technologies for the improvement of safety and the reconstruction of historic centres in the seismic area)–aims to provide tools and methods for risk reduction and seismic improvement of Lazio’s cultural assets and centres, causing research, intervention policies, and planning to interact in order to support reconstruction choices and foster dialogue with local parties and enterprises. One of the SISMI project’s main elements of innovation consists of preparing modes of integration of knowledge and assessments relating to the various components of a territory’s vulnerability and seismic hazard that can be used in other seismic territories. SISMI project, tested in seismic territories of Central Italy, is a methodology of integrated, multidimensional, and transdisciplinary investigation, in the conviction that the safety of the territory and of historic and cultural assets is the result of a dynamic risk reduction process capable of guaranteeing and promoting the local communities’ resilience, in which both physical/structural and sociocultural elements collaborate

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

Usage of experience of development of territories with similar socio-economic characteristics taken as a whole as an instrument of Kronshtadt sustainable development

This article gives an account of approach to design of sustainable regional development concept and presents the results of its usage on the Kronshtadt example. In the today?s world most of the regions are faced with a crucially important task, which is to take the way of sustainable development. There is a number of instruments, which could be successfully used in sustainable regional development concept design. One of then is a usage of experience of development of territories with similar socio-economic characteristics taken as a single whole. First of all, usage of this instrument allows to reveal economic industries that have been effectively developing in regions with similar characteristics and in the close economic conditions. Secondly, it allows to analyze measures that were taken to develop those industries and appraise their efficiency. This instrument gives an opportunity to ?learn by other people?s mistakes?. At the same time it requires to take into account internal conditions and the law-governed nature of the investigated region. Usage of this instrument could be demonstrated on Kronshtadt example. Kronshtadt is a town situated on the Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland, and presents an administrative district and municipal district of Saint-Petersburg. As the main socio-economic characteristics of the region were selected the following: -island territory; -favorable geographic position on the intersection of the sea and tourist routes; -naval dockyard and naval base town which lost its historic role and majority of government investments as the Cold War came to an end. The following regions were classified as territories similar to Kronshtadt according to socio-economic characteristics taken as a single whole: Kaliningrad region, Russia; Gibraltar island, Great Britain (one of the most important naval bases of Great Britain and key strong point of NATO at the Cold War time); Malta island (former English colony) and such historic naval dockyard and maritime towns as Medway/Chatham, Great Britain; Portsmouth, Great Britain; Rochefort, France; San-Fernando, Spain; Suomenlinna, Finland; Karlskrona, Sweden. The experience of development of these territories was systematized in the following directions: -most effectively developing economic industries; -projects that were financed by regional or federal government investments; -measures that were taken to attract commercial investments; -rules that were accepted to transfer the property rights on naval dockyards; -socio-economic effect from the implementation of the development programs. This article presents the results of the conducted research and provides recommendations for Kronshtadt sustainable development.

Geoinformatics for the conservation and promotion of cultural heritage in support of the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Cultural Heritage (CH) is recognised as being of historical, social, and anthropological value and is considered as an enabler of sustainable development. As a result, it is included in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 11 and 8. SDG 11.4 emphasises the protection and safeguarding of heritage, and SDG 8.9 aims to promote sustainable tourism that creates jobs and promotes local culture and products. This paper briefly reviews the geoinformatics technologies of photogrammetry, remote sensing, and spatial information science and their application to CH. Detailed aspects of CH-related SDGs, comprising protection and safeguarding, as well as the promotion of sustainable tourism are outlined. Contributions of geoinformatics technologies to each of these aspects are then identified and analysed. Case studies in both developing and developed countries, supported by funding directed at the UN SDGs, are presented to illustrate the challenges and opportunities of geoinformatics to enhance CH protection and to promote sustainable tourism. The potential and impact of geoinformatics for the measurement of official SDG indicators, as well as UNESCO's Culture for Development Indicators, are discussed. Based on analysis of the review and the presented case studies, it is concluded that the contribution of geoinformatics to the achievement of CH SDGs is necessary, significant and evident. Moreover, following the UNESCO initiative to introduce CH into the sustainable development agenda and related ICOMOS action plan, the concept of Sustainable Cultural Heritage is defined, reflecting the significance of CH to the United Nations' ambition to "transform our world"

HISTORICAL BUILDINGS MODELS AND THEIR HANDLING VIA 3D SURVEY: FROM POINTS CLOUDS TO USER-ORIENTED HBIM

This paper retraces some research activities and application of 3D survey techniques and Building Information Modelling (BIM) in the environment of Cultural Heritage. It describes the diffusion of as-built BIM approach in the last years in Heritage Assets management, the so-called Built Heritage Information Modelling/Management (BHIMM or HBIM), that is nowadays an important and sustainable perspective in documentation and administration of historic buildings and structures. The work focuses the documentation derived from 3D survey techniques that can be understood like a significant and unavoidable knowledge base for the BIM conception and modelling, in the perspective of a coherent and complete management and valorisation of CH. It deepens potentialities, offered by 3D integrated survey techniques, to acquire productively and quite easilymany 3D information, not only geometrical but also radiometric attributes, helping the recognition, interpretation and characterization of state of conservation and degradation of architectural elements. From these data, they provide more and more high descriptive models corresponding to the geometrical complexity of buildings or aggregates in the well-known 5D (3D + time and cost dimensions). Points clouds derived from 3D survey acquisition (aerial and terrestrial photogrammetry, LiDAR and their integration) are reality-based models that can be use in a semi-automatic way to manage, interpret, and moderately simplify geometrical shapes of historical buildings that are examples, as is well known, of non-regular and complex geometry, instead of modern constructions with simple and regular ones. In the paper, some of these issues are addressed and analyzed through some experiences regarding the creation and the managing of HBIMprojects on historical heritage at different scales, using different platforms and various workflow. The paper focuses on LiDAR data handling with the aim to manage and extract geometrical information; on development and optimization of semi-automatic process of segmentation, recognition and modelling of historical shapes of complex structures; on communication of historical heritage by virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) in a 3D reconstruction of buildings aggregates from a LiDAR and UAV survey. The HBIM model have been implemented and optimized to be managed and browse by mobile devices for not only touristic or informative scopes, but also to ensure that HBIM platforms will become more easy and valuable tools helping all professionals of AEC involved in the documentation and valorisation process, that nowadays more and more distinguish CH policies

Semantic Web Technologies Meet BIM for Accessing and Understanding Cultural Heritage

Within the EU funded project INCEPTION – Inclusive Cultural Heritage in Europe through 3D semantic modelling, the key-targeted achievement is the development of a specific cloud based platform, in order to accomplish the main objectives of accessing, understanding and strengthening European Cultural Heritage by means of enriched 3D models. The whole INCEPTION project is based on the close connection between state-of-the-art architectural modeling technologies (BIM, Building Information Modeling) and the latest cutting-edge web technologies. The platform is grounded on semantic web technologies and makes extensive use of WebGL and RESTful APIs, in order to enrich heritage 3D models by using Semantic Web standards. The INCEPTION platform will be a space for interchange of information and for the dialogue among professionals, students, scholars, curators, non-expert users, etc. Furthermore, the Semantic Web structure interlinks the platform with external Cultural Heritage available linked data and makes it gradually enhanced by specific flexible data structures provided as project specific ontologies. The paper will describe solutions based on the match between BIM, Cloud and Semantic Web

Using Virtual Environments as a Visual Interface for Accessing Cultural Database Contents

Cultural institutions have to deal with an enormous amount of data, which are stored in cultural databases usually designed for and managed by professionals. Difficulties in accessing such databases usually preclude or limit their use for the general public. Moreover, in the historic, artistic and cultural areas, an important part of the information associated to an object is related to its original historical and spatial context, an evidence that is often not disclosed, or is difficult to explain, to the non experts. For this reason, it is important to try to re-contextualize - where possible - the elements of cultural collections in the places where these objects were in the past. To this end, in this work we propose the integration of databases and Virtual Reality technologies to develop novel visual interfaces to improve the accessibility, for the non experts, to the contents of cultural databases. Virtual Reality is used to re-create the contextual environment of the objects in the database, which can be explored to gain new insights on specific elements and to improve the awareness of relationships between them. The use of two different types of Virtual Environments has been investigated in the development of the proposed visual interfaces. Results of their evaluation by a user panel, in order to assess the accessibility and effectiveness of both interfaces in relation to each other and with a classic text-based interface, are also presente

Management and communication of archaeological artefacts and architectural heritage using digital IS. What today? What next?

In this paper, we reviewed 20 years of development of 3D based IS to support archaeological and AH artefact knowledge, management and communication and their theoretical work basis. In detail, we illustrated our experiences showing the advantages and limits we had observed after extensive use. In conclusion, we have illustrated a new paradigm based on IoT-related technologies, potentially able to overcome existing problems, and the theoretical foundation of the new framework that has been designed, the concept of the Smart Cultural Object, sources and recipients of advanced information and related technological underpinning

SURVEY OF BUILDINGS, ELABORATION OF URBAN MAPS, DATABASES FOR DESCRIBING THE SEISMIC BEHAVIOUR OF HISTORICAL SITES

The survey was not extended on a single block, as was the case previously examined, but on a larger portion of territory characterized by diversified manufacturing of building. The urban texture of the historic city center of Chieri, the object of analysis, ranges from the Middle Age, with buildings made of brick masonry and horizontal elements in wooden structure, until, in the sixties of Nineteen Century, with modern buildings made of reinforced concrete. Inside the block it is possible to find buildings rich in architectural and construction typical of an urban transformation that, since medieval age, consolidated, through the Baroque period to the end of the nineteenth century, as a result of strong urban and architectural transformations. The research was developed according to the following steps: - Identification of a sample portion of land characterized by a wide assortment of historical buildings of different architectural features and different uses, with load-bearing masonry structure and stratigraphy of significant historical periods from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. - Geometrical survey of the actual state and return of buildings in their current state with the identification of the buildings, their height, width, openings at ground level and over, survey of common areas such as hallways, stairwells and courtyards. - Analysis of the fronts, the openings and the development plano-elevation of buildings, the aspect ratio of each architectural element constituting the block; - Identification of materials, the elements making up the organism resistant, both in material and constructive state, with attention to construction techniques and to the connections between the elements, as defined by the DPCM 09/02/2011, for the assessment and mitigation of seismic risk of the cultural heritage in relation to technical standards for construction - Identification of the hierarchy and constructive relations between the building and the urban context. - Identification of carriers as unidirectional or bidirectional load-bearing walls, vertical columns or masonry pillars or galleries. The presence of spaces with a significant height interstory and the presence of buildings sleeve simple or double sleeve. - Identification, where possible, of the areas of discontinuity and inhomogeneities of materials due to different construction phases (additional bodies, cant, substitutions of certain parts of buildings or floors, insertion of new structural elements and balconies etc.)