Cultural Heritage Preservation Using Internet-enabled Gis

Cultural heritage preservation makes necessary to produce an initial technical documentation to be able to establish the plans which allow to develop suitable approaches for protecting. Recent developments in the scientific methods of documentation influenced the conservation approaches to historic areas. In the past, conservation efforts focused on absolute preservation which meant preventing changes. The newer technologies like Geographic Information System (GIS) greatly facilitate the inventory, evaluation, and preservation of historic sites and allow heritage structures to be reused by planning alterations. This project presents a research for historical documentation and also a presentation using GIS and Internet Technology which allows public access to information. In this study, Fatih district of Istanbul was selected as a pilot region because it is one of the oldest settlements of the city that bridges the two continents of Europe and Asia. This study represents the interactivity of the Internet users and the spatial data as well. It is expected this web-based GIS to help the public to form a view on the development process of their urban environment. System monitoring will allow public for change detection and revealing of positive and negative impacts in time. In order to determine present status of the study area, data were acquired from different sources. Then those data were compiled by using GIS softwares for the purpose of various analysis. Public access to the information is provided on a configured web site by using Internet Map Server program. This study serves a software-independent solution to use GIS data and functions. The model facilitates easy maintenance and update data.