Interfacing built heritage through semantic visualisation of spatio-temporal sets

International audienceThe problem that we present in this paper is the visualisation of the interrelated spatio-temporal data sets on built heritage. Our position is based on a thesis that the three dimensional representation of architectural objects can be an efficient filter on the set of data architects, conservators or archaeologists handle.Documentation analysis and organisation are vital to the researcher when trying to understand the evolution of patrimonial edifices and sites. Documentary sources provide partial evidences from which the researcher will infer possible scenarios on how an edifice may have been changed throughout the centuries. They are the only scientific basis from which any hypothesis can be proposed. Still, in the field of the architectural heritage, there is a gap to fill between well established data management technologies that provide solutions for documentation handling and geometric modelling techniques that underlie reconstruction efforts.In the domain of architectural patrimony the meaning of the word visualisation is often narrowed to this of virtual reconstruction that is a dead-end realistic 3D representation. Our work clearly positions visualisation in our application aspect as an interpretation, with an ambition not for realism but for the better documentation readability and access.Our contribution introduces a solution for attaching the documentation analysis to 3D typological models of the architectural concepts that represent physical beings used in the edifice's structure. Three dimensional scenes can then be used as one of the means to retrieve or visualise the information we hold on the edifice's or site's evolution.It has to be stressed that in our system 3D scenes are calculated online as results of user queries on the spatio-temporal database of instances. Any change in database content, may it affect documentation or morphology description, is therefore visible in the scenes.We will look for the answers to the following questions: Under which conditions 3D visualisations could help in coping with the meanders of the architectural or archaeological investigation process? and How can 3D models help in visualising not only architectural shapes and forms but also what is known and what is ignored about them