MonArch - Digital Archives for Monumental Buildings

Monumental buildings such as cathedrals or castles together with their often very old and large archives form an important part of our cultural memory and heritage. Unique documents like medieval manuscripts, precious incunables, and church registers as well as original building plans, construction reports, old chemical recipies used for repairing and various others can be found in these archives. However, in many cases only a fraction of the existing documents have been catalogued, inventoried, digitally secured and preserved. Moreover, it is not straightforward to relate documents to each other based on their contents or properties. Even if the archived documents have been digitized and are digitally stored, which is the aim of many research projects all over the world, retrieval based on structural neighborhood or similarity, for example asking the query "give me all documents related to a certain façade segment", is only scarcely supported by existing digital archives for monumental buildings. Mostly, the physical documents are merely stored in chronological order in a more or less systematic way. There is practically no index or register relating the documents to the building’s structure. Similarly, it is close to impossible to systematically exploit the document base of a monumental building based on properties like the kind of damage occurring in structural parts of the building, given a certain architectural category or cultural style. The only way to find the desired information is to sequentially scan the entire archive which often means having to inspect thousands of physical documents. Presently, most archives of monumental buildings are isolated in the sense that they serve as a stand-alone store of physical or – in some cases – digital documents. Therefore, it is also impossible to interconnect different archives as postulated by Borgman [2]. As a consequence, semantically connected documents that are spread over different archives cannot be related to each other. Another issue arises from the missing standard of document descriptions. To date no consistent set of metadata and no metadata model exist, either for the structural model of the building or for other descriptive categories such as material used, kind of damage observed, architectural category, cultural style. Therefore, asking queries across different archives and buildings is almost impossible, let alone combining several digital archives in a peer-to-peer network as proposed in recent research (see e.g. [7]). In this paper, the MonArch framework [15] for distributed web-based digital archives for monumental buildings is described. The MonArch project can be seen as a contribution to built heritage preservation, i.e., keeping monumental buildings in good physical order, understanding their cultural and historical context, and conserving all related documentation. The digital archives considered are centered around constructionand maintenance-related documents, but also can and do accommodate documents mainly describing artifacts like paintings, sculptures and others. The MonArch framework supports spatial and structure-oriented queries, context-based search and retrieval, as well as an extensible indexing scheme based on a multidimensional metadata model. The system is cooperation-ready by both its communication architecture and its ability to use ontologies for semantical information integration. The MonArch system is already in operational use, but is nevertheless evaluated constantly and adapted to real life needs by a project group consisting of master builders of various monuments, restoration scientists, architects, and computer scientists. Currently, the evaluation is mainly performed from a technical point of view and monitors parameters such as general usability, functional completeness, adaptability and performance.