Page 186 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

186clay. This fact often leads to damage to their inner and outer structures as a result of natural deformations in the construction materials.However, traditional methods for monitoring heritage objects are often insu cient to obtain a large amount of speci c data on the whole structure or else merely gather environmental information on the place. Although they help diagnose the main pathologies and analyse the causes, as well as the erosion mechanisms, they do not provide an in-depth study of the detec- tion and monitoring of the deformation of these heritage sites.By designing a speci c system of sensors such as E eHDDT, it is possible to deploy a network of wireless sensor nodes to a large area or compli- cated structure in order to thoroughly monitor every part of the monument. This system was also designed to continuously monitor the site online for several years to capture the gradual deformation often caused by natural forces.As was concluded in the study, both the techni- cal analysis and the results of the experimental phase proved that the E eHDDT method based on algorithms outperformed existing methods in terms of network tra c as well as in its accuracy in detecting structural deformations.Algorithms in Islamic architectural decorationThere are cases where the use of computational techniques makes it possible to study heritage using algorithms – something that would be next to impossible with traditional methodologies – thanks to the operational speed of computers and the existence of software to facilitate the analytical tasks.This method was used, for example, to study historic Islamic architecture based on evolution- ary genetic algorithms in an initiative run by the Department of Civil Engineering of the Future University of Cairo (Egypt). This research tookinto account the fact that Islamic architectural design is cosmogonic, shaped by the laws of nature (Alrawi, 2014). This conception led tothe consideration that the patterns of Islamic architecture would mirror the development of genetic algorithms derived from the observation of nature, which was tested in order to obtain new data or theories on Islamic architecture never previously considered.This experiment was designed to be conducted at di erent levels, beginning with urban spaces and ending with architectural details. The results clearly show that Islamic architecture could be regarded as the result of the application of evo- lutionary genetic algorithms, as both the spaces and the archetypes were genetic, parametric and generative and therefore compatible with the universe, which became the measure for all things and extended to all aspects of everyday life, embodying the idea of unicity.This con rmation that the evolutionary algorith- mic system underpins Islamic art, architecture and town planning was considered of great importance to future research, which will be centred on capturing the patterns of these algo- rithms and treating them as a point of departure for preserving the identity and character of modern Islamic cities.Ontology for 3D documentationThe Cultural Informatics Research Group at Brighton University (United Kingdom) designed a database system for which it developed an ontology for documenting 3D digital models of decorative architectural elements (Echavarriaet al., 2015).289 The purpose of ontology in the eld of computational sciences is to nd the variables that appear in dataset analyses and it allows relationships to be established between them. This method was used on a collectionof Regency (an architectural style in vogue in nineteenth-century England before the Victorian period) plaster mouldings. These mouldings were chosen because they provided a rich dataset3. RESEARCHThe use of digital technologies in the conservation, analysis and dissemination of cultural heritage