Methodologies supporting the historical and archival research and for the transparency of the HBIM models of the Lazzaretto in Ancona in Luigi Vanvitelli's Design

In the Cultural Heritage domain, the potential of BIM for the built heritage is well known. However, research in Historical Building Information Modeling (HBIM) is still developing and deserves new experiments. Currently, the main objectives are the model transparency, meaning that sources and reliability of information can be linked to the model and retrieved from it, for a better interoperability and multi-disciplinary collaboration. Given the proliferation of 3D models, both informed and uninformed, and their increasing quality, there is a need to protect this heritage and provide useful uses beyond visualisation. This research not only addresses the challenge of creating an informed three-dimensional model capable of showing and documenting the evolution and transformation of the building, but also aims to achieve an output that can be used by historical experts who contribute to the creation and validation of the information apparatus. The case study is the Lazzaretto in Ancona, designed by Luigi Vanvitelli in the 18th century: it is an example of a building that shows the material culture of its time. The information gained from the primary sources, which contribute to the analysis of early modern notions of contagion, are merged with the analysis of the built environment. The proposed HBIM model is the result of interdisciplinary research between history and digital survey/representation and aims to provide the greatest transparency of knowledge in both areas. The informed model shows how the data improvement through HBIM platforms is a powerful tool to support historical-archival research and guarantees the transparency of the model

Paradigmi tecnologici per un nuovo approccio nella digital transformation del patrimonio culturale: BIM per una semantica dell’architettura storica

Il Building Information Modeling (BIM) è definito come una riproduzione digitale e completa di un'architettura che racchiude gli attributi dei modelli parametrici digitali. La sua introduzione nel mondo della rappresentazione ha cambiato radicalmente il significato dei modelli tridimensionali, proponendoli come sistemi informativi per l’architettura. Considerando il panorama del Patrimonio Architettonico si fa riferimento all’Heritage Building Information Modeling (HBIM) che è un sistema di rappresentazione dell’architettura costruita composto da librerie di oggetti semanticamente strutturati e parametrizzati. L’HBIM crea nuove possibilità per la condivisione di informazioni differenti all'interno di un unico ambiente digitale e si configura come un modo per accrescere la portabilità e per fornire dati a una più ampia comunità di utenti. Nel campo del Cultural Heritage una grande potenzialità dell’HBIM è proprio la sua capacità di combinare conoscenze e competenze trasversali, consentendo la gestione e il riutilizzo delle informazioni da parte di utenti con background diversi, integrando dati e consentendo studi interdisciplinari. Le diverse forme di gestione rappresentano il core di questo lavoro di tesi e i campi di applicazione esplorati: la stampa additiva, la documentazione storica e archivistica, la gestione della quarta dimensione per la conservazione e la datazione e la segmentazione semantica e la classificazione delle nuvole di punti per il patrimonio culturale mostrano come sia possibile definire una semantica consapevole per il Patrimonio. I modelli informativi sono strumenti preziosi che offrono vantaggi per la diffusione, la valorizzazione, la comunicazione e l'interoperabilità, la loro applicazione nel campo dei Beni Culturali è estremamente importante: la trasformazione digitale non può prescindere dalla loro diffusione e dalla costante condivisione delle competenze per una gestione sempre più completa ed efficiente del Patrimonio. ​Building Information Modeling (BIM) is defined as a digital and complete reproduction of an architecture that includes the attributes of digital parametric models. Its introduction into the world of representation has radically changed the meaning of three-dimensional models, proposing them as information systems for architecture. Considering the world of architectural heritage we refer to Heritage Building Information Modeling (HBIM) which is a system of representation of built architecture composed of libraries of semantically structured and parameterized objects. HBIM creates new possibilities for sharing different information within a single digital environment and is a way to increase portability and provide data to a wider community of users. In the field of Cultural Heritage, a great potential of HBIM is its ability to combine transversal knowledge and skills, allowing the management and reuse of information by users with different backgrounds, integrating data and enabling interdisciplinary studies. The different forms of management represent the core of this thesis work and the fields of application explored: additive printing, historical and archival documentation, fourth dimension management for conservation and dating, and semantic segmentation and point cloud classification for cultural heritage show how it is possible to define heritage-aware semantics. Information models are valuable tools offering advantages for dissemination, enhancement, communication and interoperability, their application in the field of Cultural Heritage is extremely important: the digital transformation cannot ignore their dissemination and the constant sharing of expertise for an increasingly complete and efficient management of Heritage

Metodologie a supporto ricerca storico-archivistica e per la trasparenza del modello HBIM del Lazzaretto di Ancona nel progetto di Luigi Vanvitelli

In the Cultural Heritage domain, the potential of BIM for the built heritage is well known. However, research in Historical Building Information Modeling (HBIM) is still developing and deserves new experiments. Currently, the main objectives are the model transparency, meaning that sources and reliability of information can be linked to the model and retrieved from it, for a better interoperability and multi-disciplinary collaboration. Given the proliferation of 3D models, both informed and uninformed, and their increasing quality, there is a need to protect this heritage and provide useful uses beyond visualisation. This research not only addresses the challenge of creating an informed three-dimensional model capable of showing and documenting the evolution and transformation of the building, but also aims to achieve an output that can be used by historical experts who contribute to the creation and validation of the information apparatus. The case study is the Lazzaretto in Ancona, designed by Luigi Vanvitelli in the 18th century: it is an example of a building that shows the material culture of its time. The information gained from the primary sources, which contribute to the analysis of early modern notions of contagion, are merged with the analysis of the built environment. The proposed HBIM model is the result of interdisciplinary research between history and digital survey/representation and aims to provide the greatest transparency of knowledge in both areas. The informed model shows how the data improvement through HBIM platforms is a powerful tool to support historical-archival research and guarantees the transparency of the model

Modeling the Fourth Dimension of Architectural Heritage: Enabling Processes for a Sustainable Conservation

This study focuses on modeling the fourth dimension of historic architectures with an HBIM approach and special regard to stratigraphic analysis. The goal is to push the limits of current technology to understand the history of buildings, with impacts on protecting their authenticity; it is pursued with a practitioners-oriented methodology able to make aware models of their phases. The target audience are experts in the field of heritage conservation, while the outcome is to support long-term strategies for the sustainable management of heritage. Contents follow this structure: (1) Introduction: this section frames the benefits of affirming heritage’s physical authenticity and managing risks; it clarifies assumptions and the research aim; (2) State of the Art: this highlights the topic relevance, which is not yet fully resolved, focusing on semantics, critical-interpretative data control, and on the automation of some crucial results; (3) Materials and Methods: this describes the integrated workflow, including the photogrammetric acquisition, modeling, and data enrichment, the semi-automatic Harris matrix construction, and the optimization of laser data; (4) Results: this presents the results of modelling stratigraphic units, enriching them with information according to a semantics coherent with the conservation process, to govern the temporal relations while automating key outputs; (5) Discussion: this section refines the implemented solutions and introduce future works

Hbim methodology as a bridge between Italy and Argentina

The availability of efficient HBIM workflows could represent a very important change towards a more efficient management of the historical real estate. The present work shows how to obtain accurate and reliable information of heritage buildings through reality capture and 3D modelling to support restoration purposes or knowledge-based applications. Two cases studies metaphorically joint Italy with Argentina. The research article explains the workflows applied at the Palazzo Ferretti at Ancona and the Manzana Hist\uf3rica de la Universidad National del Litoral, providing a constructive comparison and blending technological and theoretical approaches. In a bottom-up process, the assessment of two cases study validates a workflow allowing the achievement of a useful and proper data enrichment of each HBIM model. Another key aspect is the Level of Development (LOD) evaluation of both models: different ranges and scales are defined in America (100\u2013500) and in Italy (A\u2013G), nevertheless is possible to obtain standard shared procedures, enabling facilitation of HBIM development and diffusion in operating workflows

Digital Facsimiles of Architectural Heritage: New Forms of Fruition, Management and Enhancement. The Exemplary Case of the Ducal Palace at Urbino

The digitalization of cultural heritage is a necessary multidimensional process to protect historical and cultural heritage, enabling in-depth knowledge and to manage it as completely as possible. The case study here presented shows the first challenging task of a multidisciplinary research project: the general aim is to improve an exemplary architectural object starting from its complete digitalization and to propose multisensory fruition solutions. This article analyzes the early stage that is the architectural survey, modeling and parameterization. The integration of different techniques is mandatory to obtain a final outcome representing a reliable basis for conservation and valorization of the Cultural Heritage. The digitalization workflow includes different sensors and scales, such as terrestrial and portable laser scanners, 360 and HD images. The achieved goal is a digital model, scientifically validated, with high accuracy that contains 3D data and that is configured as a starting point for the reconstruction of the artifact historical phases and for VR/AR applications. The research shows a solid and interdisciplinary approach applied to the case study: the activities and addressed challenges reveal a response to multifaceted problems

Learning from Synthetic Point Cloud Data for Historical Buildings Semantic Segmentation

Historical heritage is demanding robust pipelines for obtaining Heritage Building Information Modeling models that are fully interoperable and rich in their informative content. The definition of efficient Scan-to-BIM workflows represent a very important step toward a more efficient management of the historical real estate, as creating structured three-dimensional (3D) models from point clouds is complex and time-consuming. In this scenario, semantic segmentation of 3D Point Clouds is gaining more and more attention, since it might help to automatically recognize historical architectural elements. The way paved by recent Deep Learning approaches proved to provide reliable and affordable degrees of automation in other contexts, as road scenes understanding. However, semantic segmentation is particularly challenging in historical and classical architecture, due to the shapes complexity and the limited repeatability of elements across different buildings, which makes it difficult to define common patterns within the same class of elements. Furthermore, as Deep Learning models requires a considerably large amount of annotated data to be trained and tuned to properly handle unseen scenes, the lack of (big) publicly available annotated point clouds in the historical building domain is a huge problem, which in fact blocks the research in this direction. However, creating a critical mass of annotated point clouds by manual annotation is very time-consuming and impractical. To tackle this issue, in this work we explore the idea of leveraging synthetic point cloud data to train Deep Learning models to perform semantic segmentation of point clouds obtained via Terrestrial Laser Scanning. The aim is to provide a first assessment of the use of synthetic data to drive Deep Learning--based semantic segmentation in the context of historical buildings. To achieve this purpose, we present an improved version of the Dynamic Graph CNN (DGCNN) named RadDGCNN. The main improvement consists on exploiting the radius distance. In our experiments, we evaluate the trained models on synthetic dataset (publicly available) about two different historical buildings: the Ducal Palace in Urbino, Italy, and Palazzo Ferretti in Ancona, Italy. RadDGCNN yields good results, demonstrating improved segmentation performances on the TLS real datasets

Digit(al)isation in Museums: Civitas Project – AR, VR, Multisensorial and Multiuser Experiences at the Urbino’s Ducal Palace

Digit(al)isation of Cultural Heritage is a multidimensional process that helps in the rescue of European Cultural Identity, and the paradigm of Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) is a valid instrument for social and cognitive inclusion of museum visitors. In light of disseminating and validating new paradigms for the enjoyment and exploitation of Cultural Heritage (CH) artifacts, this chapter shows main first results from CIVITAS (ChaIn for excellence of reflectiVe societies to exploit dIgital culTural heritAge and museumS). The project develops virtual/augmented environments, through the multisensorial interaction with virtual artworks, to satisfy needs and overcome limitations in a larger CH scenario, applying a bottom-up approach. The research presented show a robust and interdisciplinary approach applied to Ducal Pace at Urbino: key activities and faced challenges demonstrated to test cross-fertilization strategies, involving multilayered issues