Page 183 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

professionals. However, in order to provide access to 3D digital content and allow it to be used creatively and analytically, it is necessaryto address challenges such as the availability of open repositories for this type of content, and the need to sort and classify each element using suitable metadata to retrieve data without losing the stored information. This entails di erent applications and mechanisms for making sense of all this digital information by allowing each of the items to be incorporated and cross-searched, building semantic narratives, analysing data, supporting scienti c discourse and, no less importantly, attracting users who demand this digital information.To tackle these challenges, one of the most signi cant areas of research involving the digi- tisation of heritage is the development of tech- nologies and systems to support the organisation and detection of 3D digital content in the eld of cultural heritage. This has given rise to many pilot projects devoted speci cally to designing and implementing databases specialised in cultural heritage.ITN-DCH projectThis was the purpose of the European ITN- DCH275 project (Initial Training Network for Digital Cultural Heritage: Projecting our Past to the Future), which arose as a collaborative e ort between the academic world, research institu- tions, industries, museums, archives and libraries to document, preserve and protect cultural heritage through digital technologies networks.Coordinated by the Digital Heritage Research Lab276 of the University of Technology in Cyprus, it was begun in 2013 for a four-year period.ITN-DCH is aimed at both tangible and intan- gible heritage and its purpose is to create a network for sharing the various experiments and research carried out in the eld of heritage and new technologies.To date four case studies have been developed: the Church of the Virgin or of Asinou277 (Troodos region, Cyprus), the ancient Roman military encampment of Carnuntum278 (Austria), the ruins of Donaustauf castle (Germany) and the tombs found at Ilmendorf279 (Germany), which date to the late period of the Hallstatt culture.All these cases entailed developing digital tools for personal devices, mixed and augmented reality interactives, new metadata procedures, forms of representing tangible and intangible heritage in 3D and 4D, and new ways of storing and exchanging data via the internet.Geodatabase for data managementThe concept of geodatabase refers to a primary model for storing ArcGIS data. Its main advan- tage is that it stores many di erent types of GIS data, making it a major ally in forming databases made up of complex, highly heterogeneous data, as in the case of heritage assets.With this idea in mind, Cirgeo (Interdepartment Research Center of Geomatics280), an Italian cen- tre belonging to the University of Padua (Italy), developed an online management and documen- tation system for handling data gleaned from various resources and documentation phases related to a particular cultural asset. The data management system is based on a geodatabase for storing di erent types of datasets (Guarnieri et al., 2016).281The chosen test-case scenario was the Villa Revedin Bolasco complex in Castelfranco V neto (Treviso, Italy) and its grounds, which was built in the nineteenth century following several resto- rations of the original fourteenth-century area.The Web-GIS platform, an interactive map,was implemented using NASA satellite images through the Web World Wind application. It was used to enable visitors to navigate and explore the villa’s grounds, a large park.AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2017183The use of digital technologies in the conservation, analysis and dissemination of cultural heritage