From acquisition to presentation—the potential of semantics to support the safeguard of cultural heritage

Abstract

The signature of the 2019 Declaration of Cooperation on advancing the digitization of cultural heritage in Europe shows the important role that the 3D digitization process plays in the safeguard and sustainability of cultural heritage. The digitization also aims at sharing and presenting cultural heritage. However, the processing steps of data acquisition to its presentation requires an interdisciplinary collaboration, where understanding and collaborative work is difficult due to the presence of different expert knowledge involved. This study proposes an end-to-end method from the cultural data acquisition to its presentation thanks to explicit semantics representing the different fields of expert knowledge intervening in this process. This method is composed of three knowledge-based processing steps: (i) a recommendation process of acquisition technology to support cultural data acquisition; (ii) an object recognition process to structure the unstructured acquired data; and (iii) an enrichment process based on Linked Open Data to document cultural objects with further information, such as geospatial, cultural, and historical information. The proposed method was applied in two case studies concerning the watermills of Ephesos terrace house 2 and the first Sacro Monte chapel in Varallo. These application cases show the proposed method’s ability to recognize and document digitized cultural objects in different contexts thanks to the semantics.