An ontological model for the reality-based 3D annotation of heritage building conservation state

Abstract

The conservation and restoration of historical monuments require a diagnostic analysis carried out by amultidisciplinary team. The results of the diagnosis include data produced by different techniques andprotocols, which are used by conservation scientists to assess the built heritage. Nowadays, together withthe aforementioned data, a great deal of heterogeneous information is also available, including descriptiveand contextual information, as well as 2D/3D geometrical restitution of the studied object. However, theintegration of these diverse data into a unique information model capable of fully describing the buildingconservation state, as well as integrating future data, is still an open issue within the Cultural Heritagecommunity. It is of paramount importance to correlate these data and spatialize them in order to providescientists in charge of our heritage with a practical and easy means to explore the information usedduring their assessment, as well as a way to record their scientific observation and share them withintheir community of practice. In order to resolve this issue, we developed a correlation pipeline for theintegration of the semantic, spatial and morphological dimension of a built heritage. The pipeline uses anontological model for recording and integrating multidisciplinary observations of the conservation stateinto structural data spatialized into a semantic-aware 3D representation. The pipeline was successfullytested on the Saint Maurice church of Caromb in the south of France, integrating into a unique spatialrepresentation information about material and alteration phenomena, providing users with a means tocorrelate, and more importantly retrieve several types of information.