Exploiting the architectural heritage's documentation: a case study on data analysis and visualisation

ISSN 0948-695xDocumentation 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 changed through the centuries. Still, in the field of the architectural heritage, there is a gap to fill between proven data management technologies that provide solutions for documentation handling, and geometric modelling techniques that underlie reconstruction efforts. Documentation is organised with regards to what the documents are: books, illustrations, etc.. Virtual renderings feature a geometry that bears no link to the documentation's analysis.<br />Our contribution introduces a solution for attaching the documentation to architectural concepts that represent physical beings used in the edifice's structure, and this without modifications on existing documentation descriptions. 3D scenes can then be used as one of the means to access or visualise the information we hold on the edifice's or site's evolution