During the past few years museums and other cultural heritage institutions have started making use of handheld technologies to provide tourist guides to their visitors. For open-air sites, a number of experimental and commercial applications have been developed based on location-based guides. However, in museum environments static audiovisual guides are the dominant technologies used. In this p...

Farmland often contributes scenic quality and cultural heritage to a region; however, these factors are challenging to incorporate into standard farmland valuation schemes because of their qualitative nature. This research develops a method for enhancing the Land Evaluation and Site Assessment (LESA) model to incorporate scenic quality and cultural heritage elements into the rating scheme. Data...

In this essay, we describe a system and tools that we are creating and that allows us to produce similarity (SC) cluster representations of the contents of our Culture Heritage (CH) Forum. The motivation for introducing these types of technologies in the context of cultural heritage materials is to allow the use of spatial vector-based computational techniques that result in similarity mapping....

Museums and archives collect and store documentation of processes of intangible cultural heritage (ICH), such as craftsmanship skills, acts, and events recorded in videos, audio tapes, manuscripts, photos, and transcriptions. Such recordings are typically catalogued in an object-centric way as documents, using schemas such as Dublin Core. Also in event-centric models the focus has been on tangi...

Il Progetto Nu.M.E. (Nuovo Museo Elettronico della Storia della Città di Bologna), è iniziato nel 1997 dall’idea di poter creare un ambiente virtuale che permettesse di realizzare una ricostruzione tridimensionale dell’habitat urbano e delle sue trasformazioni storiche dai giorni nostri al 1200. È nata così la città in 4 dimensioni (tre dimensioni spaziali più una temporale) che permette ai vis...

Compensation measures are a new method for handling impact on cultural heritage in land use planning. The idea with compensation measures can be understood as an extension of the polluter pays principle. Today, compensation measures are mainly used when natural environments are damaged by development, but it is also possible to use compensation measures when a project results in negative impact...

Seismic hazard analysis is performed for a representative zone in Peru, including the city of Cusco, the citadel of Machupicchu and the archeological complex of Choquequirao, constituting the area with important Inca heritage. This is considered to be the first step towards developing a rational approach to seismic risk analysis of the Inca’s architectural heritage. An evaluation of the vulnera...

Cultural Heritage Sites are in danger of being destroyed due to several factors, such as earthquakes, uncontrolled urbanization and air pollution. The latest, whether it is from industrial, transport or domestic sources, can cause significant degradation and corrosion of cultural monuments. The use of satellite images for monitoring air pollution in different areas has received considerable att...

Current museum metadata tends to be focused around the properties of the heritage object such as the artist, style and date of creation. This form of metadata can index a museum’s collection but cannot express the relations between heritage objects and related concepts found in contemporary museum exhibitions. A modern museum exhibition, rather than providing a taxonomic classification of herit...

Standards developed for industrial or commercial purposes cannot be applied to cultural heritage for two reasons: some methodologies are invasive/destructive; others are not destructive but have readings in arbitrary units and calibration is hardly possible for the specific case of cultural heritage materials that are weathered, chemically degraded, transformed, or affected by fungi or insects....