Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital city, is host for this year’s conference. Edinburgh is an ancient city built on seven hills beside the Firth of Forth. Responsible for the Scottish Reformation and Enlightenment, it is now both a UNESCO world heritage site and one of the UK’s strongest economies. It is home to the world’s largest arts festival and is regularly voted as the best place to live in the...

This paper examines the potential for preserving Europe's cultural heritage in a digital world. After an extensive literature review on the economics of museums and the digitization of cultural heritage, it highlights national and international political initiatives to create cooperative cultural heritage systems. As a mean of achieving global integration while simultaneously keeping institutio...

A UNESCO project, Support for the Preparation for the World Heritage Serial Nomination of the Silk Roads in South Asia, afforded the opportunity to research evidence for Silk Roads exchange in South Asia. The first part of the paper explores the challenges of archaeology in the Kingdom of Bhutan, located on the southern slopes of the eastern Himalayas. GIS-based approaches to model earlier sett...

This paper discusses a recent study to test the effectiveness of combining 3D virtual worlds (VWs) with Problem Based Learning (PBL) in archaeological education of undergraduate college students at two American universities. The testbed used was a virtual world of Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli (Italy), a World Heritage Site dating to the reign of Hadrian (117-138 CE). At both universities courses w...

industry, posing an increasing threat to the unique and fearless wildlife studied by Darwin. While the island officially only had 17,000 inhabitants in 2000, many more arrived unrecorded, and some saw the national park as a nuisance and resorted to arson to clear land for their own use. The Galápagos Islands became Unesco's very first World Heritage Site in 1978, attracting yet more visitors. I...

Big data has huge commercial value and potential. Under the background of big data, a heritage site is faced with a number of questions and challenges such as, how to accelerate industrial innovation, benign competition and the creation of new business value. Based on the analysis of service data from the national archaeological site and park, Yuan Ming Yuan, this paper investigates the common ...

Doñana National Park marshes, in South West Spain, extents over 27,000 ha of the Gualdalquivir River estuary, on the Atlantic Ocean coast. The site undergoes a yearly cycle of inundation in autumn and drying out during the spring season. While flooded, Doñana wetlands create a crucial passage, breeding and wintering site for more than half million waterfowl each year, including about 150 bird s...

Introduction World Heritage had originally been designed as a conservation tool for sites deemed to be of ‘outstanding universal value’ (UNESCO, 2006a). However, its status was soon to become very popular among tourists (Bandarin, 2005; Evans, 2001; Rakic & Leask, 2006; Shackley, 2006) and the World Heritage related issues thus also attracted great interest of the wider academic community. It s...