The Development of a Digital Management System for Historic Buildings in Taiwan

Because of the numerous types of world heritage that currently exist, UNESCO divides them into four categories: cultural heritage, natural heritage, cultural and heritage dual heritage, and cultural landscape heritage. Taiwan’s Cultural Heritage Preservation Act stipulates that tangible cultural heritage include monuments, historic buildings, commemorative buildings, groups of buildings, archaeological sites, historic sites, cultural landscapes, antiquities, and natural landscapes and natural monuments, whereas its intangible cultural heritage include traditional performing arts, traditional craftsmanship, oral traditions and expressions, folklore, and traditional knowledge and practices. Because of continually increasing tasks associated with cultural heritage management, this study adopted research approaches such as compilation of relevant laws and regulations and interviews with managers to identify their needs in managing cultural heritage. This study posited that digital-based information management is highly conductive to managing cultural heritage. Thus, a dynamic cultural heritage management system was developed to help managers perform various heritage preservation and management-related work. The proposed system enables digitalizing related documents to facilitate their preservation, provides diversified functions that allow managers to conduct remote interactive management, and enables establishing various economical monitoring functions. This study used actual cases of cultural heritage preservation and input data collected from various management tasks into the proposed management system. Accordingly, the management functions of the system were verified successfully. The proposed system can help relevant departments manage cultural heritage, diminish the occurrence of problems concerning heritage management, reduce unnecessary waste of resources, and elevate the management quality of monuments and historical buildings