Photogrammetry and archaeological knowledge: toward a 3D<br />information system dedicated to medieval archaeology: a case study of<br />Shawbak Castle in Jordan

The paper presents an interdisciplinary project which is the first step towards a 3D Geographical Information System (GIS) dedicated to Cultural Heritage with a specific focus application on the Castle of Shawbak, also known as the ”Crac de Montral” in Jordan. The project continues to grow thanks to a synergy between a set of laboratories: The LSIS laboratory, France in charge of the pho- togrammetric survey phase connected with the knowledge based approach; ITABC, CNR lab in Roma, Italy in charge of the topometric survey, with DGPS and aerial photography with gas balloon, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Kyoto, Japan for the 3D view point seek connected to the database, the image processing aspect managed by Stratos documentation, SimVis from The Department of Computer Science, University of Hull, UK, for the virtual reality aspect and of course the Dipartimento di Studi storici e Geografici from the University of Florence, Italy, in charge of the archaeological part. Our project focuses on a building scale encompassing its atomic elements such as ashlars blocks, cement, stratigraphic units and archi- tectonic elements. At this scale we need a full 3D interface in order to manage accurate measurements, a huge quantity of observations and a mainly heterogeneous archaeological documentation. This project described in this paper is work in progress. After four photogrammetric campaigns in Jordan the first results are available on the project web site: http://www.shawbak.ne