Spatial informatics in the cultural heritage sector

Günümüzde bilişim ve iletişim teknolojileri, hemen hemen her alanda olduğu gibi, kültürel miraslarla ilgili projelerde de önemi giderek artan bir rol oynamaktadır. Sözü edilen bu rol kültürel miraslar alanında, insanoğlunun kendi kültürel ve doğal mirasının değerini anlamasında ve arttırmasında, bu mirasları korumasında ve bunlara erişimin kolaylaştırılmasında önem kazanmaktadır. Bugün kültürel miraslarla ilgilenen kuruluşların çoğu projeleri ile ilgili mekansal ve öznitelik verilerinin toplanmasında, düzenlenmesinde, yorumlanmasında ve internet üzerinden paylaşımında bilişim ve iletişim teknolojilerinden yararlanmaktadır. Bu teknolojilerle çeşitli değerlendirme, analiz ve karar-verme sistemlerine yönelik olarak geliştirilen uygulamalar ile internet servisleri genellikle farklı zamanlarda tasarlanmakta ve değişik biçimlerde oluşturulmaktadır. Bu nedenle, sözü edilen kuruluşlar sürekli yenilenen akademik ve/veya ticari hedeflere ulaşabilmek için, farklı kullanımlara yönelik uygulamaların ve teknolojilerin, birlikte aynı amaca yönelik hizmet verebilmelerini sağlayacak etkin, ucuz ve hızlı yöntemleri ortaya çıkarma problemi ile karşı karşıya kalmaktadır. Bu çalışma kapsamında geliştirilen ve Kültürel Miras Projelerinin Mekan Bazlı Girişim Mimarisi Çatkısı olarak adlandırılan “GeoCHEAF” belirtilen probleme çözüm getirmektedir. Değişik amaçları olan farklı kullanıcılar uyarlanabilir yapıdaki bu mimari çatkıyı kendi gereksinimlerine göre kültürel miraslarla ilgili araştırmalarına, projelerine, karar-verme süreçlerine katabilir ya da farklı çözünürlükte çözümlerin üretilmesinde kullanabilir. Bu mimari çatkı kültürel miras projelerinde en üst düzeyde açıklık, birlikte işlerlik, genişletilebilirlik, esneklik, etkileşim, sürdürülebilirlik ve ölçeklenebilirlik elde edebilmek amacıyla geliştirilmiştir ve çatkı tasarımının ana fikri bu çalışmada açıklanacaktır. Anahtar Kelimeler: Kültürel miraslar, girişim mimarisi, bilişim ve iletişim teknolojileri, mekânsal bilişim.Information and Communication Technology (ICT) plays an increasingly critical role in almost everything these days as well as in the work of the heritage sector, which acts to understand, promote, present, preserve, and improve access to humanity's cultural and natural heritage. Many of today's cultural heritage (CH) organizations rely on digital information and communication technology to gather, organize, interpret, and disseminate data relating to their various projects. In many cases, this involves applications and services that were created at different times and designed for different computing platforms. The challenge now faced by these organizations is to provide efficient and effective methods by which these disparate technologies can work together to achieve academic and/or commercial objectives that are constantly evolving. The Geo-enable Cultural Heritage Enterprise Architecture Framework (GeoCHEAF), a spatially-enabled open enterprise architecture framework for the cultural heritage domain, has been developed in response to this challenge in the scope of the study. 'GeoCHEAF' is the result of rigorous analysis of the CH domain operations and data sharing requirements and consideration of the ways in which modern internet technologies can support the CH projects workflows. It explores and captures business and technical requirements of the cultural heritage domain and elaborates design principles for the requirements. These principles have been intended to deliver enterprise solutions and to provide decision-making activities, which needs a modeling and design approach. Therefore, in this study, the modular design process of the comprehensive and sophisticated framework 'GeoCHEAF' has been explained first as a development and then, as a customization framework for the cultural heritage projects to make them more effective in almost every sense. The crucial point of the design is to pinpoint web based-Spatial Information System at the center of the enterprise architecture framework and integrate it with information and communication technologies in a coherent conceptual model along with an executable architecture for optimized use. While 'GeoCHEAF' delivers an innovative road map for the cultural heritage community, it provides an opportunity for the cultural heritage domain to share rethinking on the direction of the cultural heritage resource management and research, and on future cultural heritage strategies for improving and evaluating the impact of these on the cultural heritage sector. 'GeoCHEAF' demonstrates how a cultural heritage enterprise works within a geo-enable enterprise architecture and the relationship between the parts (systems) of the whole by capturing the structure and the behavior of the systems in the enterprise. The conceptual framework 'GeoCHEAF' is comprised of many other sub-frameworks, such as an enterprise-wide business framework, web computing framework, geoprocessing framework, run-time framework for visualization. The theoretical concepts underlying the approaches to be advocated in this article concerned the cultural heritage domain-driven science-oriented technology-enabled business-sensitive cultural heritage studies. Under this approach 'GeoCHEAF' seeks to reach out across the CH domain for partnering with CH enterprises' research, development and solutions. In the context of this study, this cultural heritage strategy proposed describes its design rationale in attempting to achieve maximum openness, interoperability, extensibility, flexibility, interactivity, maintainability and scalability for projects of cultural significance. Effective seamless integration of technology based upon the open standards and semantic technologies provides an interoperable architecture which expands communication and dissemination of the cultural heritage data and information to the public. 'GeoCHEAF' uses this approach not only to create a better modularity for user and functional requirements of the enterprise, but also to create the most productive enterprise computing architecture for the cultural heritage domain.Finally, this article examines not only how modern-day spatially-enabled open enterprise architecture framework can be configured to embrace cultural heritage projects, but also addresses how this cultural heritage strategy proposed can drive positive change within the cultural heritage domain by simply adopting elements of the enterprise architecture process. Keywords: Cultural heritage, enterprise architecture, information and communication