Using Abstraction Levels in the Visual Exploitation of a Knowledge Acquisition Process

Investigating the evolution of patrimonial architecture requires gathering and analysing a mass of documentary sources, the interpretation of which may authorise researchers to produce graphical simulations of the morphological evolutions of edifices. We have demonstrated that such representations can be used as graphic interfaces in which architectural objects are located in time and space. However in the field of the architectural heritage, due to the lack or incompleteness of the documentation, at the beginning of an investigation objects are often known to researchers only by their toponimical reference: their contextual names. In the early phases of an investigation process, it is most often impossible to state with any reasonable accuracy what morphology an object had. Moreover, other clues to the understanding of the edifice and its evolution, such as terminology/ontology or analogies, can be gathered by the researchers before someone actually states what morphology the object could have. Aiming at improving the comprehension of the complex and discontinuous process of knowledge acquisition we introduce a generic formalism of information integration that lets the researchers to gather indications little by little, and allows them to follow up visually the knowledge acquisition process. This paper introduces the use of toponymy as a start point for the analysis of the edifice, and describes the formalism we have developed in order to generalise this approach.