Diachronic Reconstruction and Visualization of Lost Cultural Heritage Sites

25 p.Cultural heritage (CH) documentation is essential for the study and promotion of CH assets/sites, and provides a way of transmitting knowledge about heritage to future generations. The integration of the fourth dimension into geospatial datasets enables generating a diachronic model of CH elements, namely, a set of three-dimensional (3D) models to represent their evolution in various historical phases. The enhanced four-dimensional (4D) modeling (3D plus time) pursues a better understanding of the CH scenario, enriching historical hypotheses as well as contributing to the conservation and decision-making process. Although new geomatic techniques have reduced the amount of fieldwork, when put together, the geometric and temporal dimensions imply the interpretation of heterogeneous historical information sources and their integration. However, this situation could reach a critical point when the study elements are no longer present. The main challenge is to harmonize the different historical and archaeological data sources that are available with the current remains in order to graphically rebuild and model the lost CH assets with a high degree of reliability. Moreover, 4D web visualization is a great way to disclose the CH information and cultural identity. Additionally, it will serve as a basis to perform simulations of possible future risks or changes that can happen during planned or hypothetical restoration processes. This paper aims to examine the study case of a diachronic reconstruction by means of a mobile laser system (MLS) and reverse modeling techniques for a lost urban CH element: the citadel or Alcázar gate of Ávila. Within this aim, the final model is evaluated in terms of the consistency of the historical sources to assess its suitability considering the constructive interpretations that are required to integrate heterogenous data sources. Moreover, geometric modeling is evaluated regarding the current remains and its surroundings. Finally, a web 4D viewer is presented for its dissemination and publicity. This paper is an extended and improved version of our paper that was published in the 2018 ISPRS Technical Commission II Symposium, Riva del Garda, Italy, 3–7 June 2018.S

Revisiting the city, augmented with digital technologies: The SeeARch tool

This paper presents a digital tool that enables the city inhabitants or visitors to acquire in real time, relevant information about several aspects of a given city, augmenting their real experience of the place. We used digital technologies, particularly an in-house developed Augmented Reality (AR) tool referred to as SeeARch,that augments in situ the city explo-ration experience. This tablet-based AR tool, enables mobile users to recognize the facade of specific buildings and, in real-time, superimpose relevant associated 3D and multimedia information, while visiting the city. The aim of this app is to provide customized infor-mation to visitors suiting their own interests and time to visit the city. User satisfaction evaluation tests were performed with a sample of the potential users. The outcomes of such user studies, showed that participants considered that our approach delivers a more detailed knowledge about the city, and is more informative, when compared with the nor-mal sight-seeing visits in the city, performed by the same participants.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Revisiting the city augmented by digital technologies – SeeARch tool

This paper presents a digital tool that enables the city inhabitants or visitors to acquire in real time, relevant information about several aspects of a given city, augmenting their real experience of the place. We used digital technologies, particularly an in-house developed Augmented Reality (AR) tool referred to as SeeARch,that augments in situ the city explo-ration experience. This tablet-based AR tool, enables mobile users to recognize the facade of specific buildings and, in real-time, superimpose relevant associated 3D and multimedia information, while visiting the city. The aim of this app is to provide customized infor-mation to visitors suiting their own interests and time to visit the city. User satisfaction evaluation tests were performed with a sample of the potential users. The outcomes of such user studies, showed that participants considered that our approach delivers a more detailed knowledge about the city, and is more informative, when compared with the nor-mal sight-seeing visits in the city, performed by the same participants.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

REVISITING PREHISTORIC ARCHEOLOGICAL SITES: ENVISIONING FIRST BUILT ENVIRONMENTS TO REPOSSESS GEOGRAPHICALLY SPECIFIC APPROACHES IN ARCHITECTURE

Since Prehistoric times, architecture had been a human response to an occurring natural setting. Starting from places of dwelling to buildings that no longer only serve physical requirements for survival. Architectural languages were approached initially as an expression of culture, evolution, and growth of a community within a natural setting. This response resulted in the creation of built environments, humanity’s decision to become sedentary. This decision took place in the Late Stone age, a key phase in our timeline. First built environments were born in a time known as the Neolithic revolution, which shown itself as humans transitioned from hunter-gatherer societies to agrarian based ones. Once Nature shaped man, now man shapes nature. We observe the dynamic created between man the hosting setting. While observing this two sided complex operating system through revisiting prehistoric archeological sites, we can notice how various geographic zones birthed a diversity of built environments. However, by observing the paradigm of duality in our modern world, we can see neglected neighborhoods and cities, and more importantly that we failed to fulfill our fair part of shaping our natural setting and this reflected on the state of our communities as well. By repossessing how to be geographically specific in architecture, we can set the parameters to architectural planning that includes nature as a co-partner and as a result attempt to improve the well-being of our neglected communities

An overview of virtual city modelling : emerging organisational issues

This paper presents a recent overview of the increasing use of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies for the simulation of urban environments. It builds on previous research conducted on the identification of three-dimensional (3D) city models and offers an analysis of the development, utilization and construction of VR city models. Issues pertaining to advantages, barriers and ownership are identified. The paper describes a case study of the development of a VR model for the city of Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK and outlines the role that academic institutions can play in both the creation and utilization of urban models. The study offers a new approach for the creation, management and update of urban models and reflects on issues which are emerging. Areas for future research are discussed

Social and Semantic Contexts in Tourist Mobile Applications

The ongoing growth of the World Wide Web along with the increase possibility of access information through a variety of devices in mobility, has defi nitely changed the way users acquire, create, and personalize information, pushing innovative strategies for annotating and organizing it. In this scenario, Social Annotation Systems have quickly gained a huge popularity, introducing millions of metadata on di fferent Web resources following a bottom-up approach, generating free and democratic mechanisms of classi cation, namely folksonomies. Moving away from hierarchical classi cation schemas, folksonomies represent also a meaningful mean for identifying similarities among users, resources and tags. At any rate, they suff er from several limitations, such as the lack of specialized tools devoted to manage, modify, customize and visualize them as well as the lack of an explicit semantic, making di fficult for users to bene fit from them eff ectively. Despite appealing promises of Semantic Web technologies, which were intended to explicitly formalize the knowledge within a particular domain in a top-down manner, in order to perform intelligent integration and reasoning on it, they are still far from reach their objectives, due to di fficulties in knowledge acquisition and annotation bottleneck. The main contribution of this dissertation consists in modeling a novel conceptual framework that exploits both social and semantic contextual dimensions, focusing on the domain of tourism and cultural heritage. The primary aim of our assessment is to evaluate the overall user satisfaction and the perceived quality in use thanks to two concrete case studies. Firstly, we concentrate our attention on contextual information and navigation, and on authoring tool; secondly, we provide a semantic mapping of tags of the system folksonomy, contrasted and compared to the expert users' classi cation, allowing a bridge between social and semantic knowledge according to its constantly mutual growth. The performed user evaluations analyses results are promising, reporting a high level of agreement on the perceived quality in use of both the applications and of the speci c analyzed features, demonstrating that a social-semantic contextual model improves the general users' satisfactio

From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design

As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain "ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources, environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c

Generating Urban Forms from Ontologies

The paper presents the ongoing research work on a software system for supporting the exploration of the numerous and often interrelated factors that can affect the urban design. The present implementation of the system supports the simulation of different urban scenarios in relation to the uniqueness and constraints peculiar to a design and a site. The paper considers our ongoing research work to formally represent the implicit and explicit knowledge used by means of ontologies. The ontology semantic system administrates a set of rules and relations among urban entities. To this aim, we are dealing with different issues: all the factors involved in the urban design process cross various domain knowledge, from different competencies and sources; the knowledge is both semantic and procedural