Advanced Data Environment in Current Cultural Heritage 3D Digitization Practices

Dear Colleagues,

Three-dimensional scanning in the mid-1990s and later digital photogrammetry appeared as techniques to digitally reproduce the shape and appearance of physical objects. With this aim, they have also been introduced in the field of cultural heritage (CH), with an increasing scope of techniques to capture geometry (IMMS and SLAM) and appearance features (MLIC and RTI). However, this purpose soon turned out to be very limited compared to the cognitive, operational, and communicative needs of the existing heritage.

CH studies are at the crossroads of many disciplines, including heritage sciences and data sciences. For the past few decades, a large number of experts, projects, and experiences have contributed to building this field of study from digitized or digitally born resources. The digital heritage scientific community is currently growing and evolving, generating at the same time a mass of data composed of images, 3D models, maps, databases, web components, metadata, and so on. The way to handle and manage the data along its lifecycle differs from experts, groups, and institutions at all scales and across any borders; those protocols are mostly intangible and not often documented. All of us know that data management is a multifaceted activity occurring all over the operating chain. It is also dependent on the data environment, understood as the collection of computer systems and associated infrastructure, to store, enrich, share, and expose raw or curated data. The need for new or strengthened data management is motivated by many factors: the sophistication and automation level of digitization devices and processes, the increasing computational power, and the miniaturization of sensors and electronic chips. All these points have augmented our capacity to collect, process, and store data by leaving an empty space on how to structure, sort, and organize the research data that is nowadays incoming in unprecedented volume. Another factor contributing to this overgrowing mass of data concerns the emphasizing of semantic aspects (i.e., the cognitive, informative, or descriptive added value of digital assets and resources). Furthermore, the rising challenge of interoperability implies expanding digitization results toward new types of outputs that are recognizable, reproducible, and capable of bringing new knowledge in order to enable more effective conservation processes and easier communication of asset consistency and value.

This Special Issue focuses on the methods to improve data management throughout the workflows leading to the creation of a digital heritage asset or corpus, exploiting 2.5D- and 3D-based digital capture techniques. The scope is widely open to obtain an overview of current practices at different scales, for example:

—  Data management dedicated to massive digitization or managing large and complex CH sites or collections of objects.

— Optimization of data management in processing pipelines.

— Low-level or top-level semantic enrichment by user-driven and/or computer-driven approaches.

— Reinforcing data provenance, traceability, and lineage from raw data acquisition toward interoperable web-semantic scenarios.

— Integration of real-based modeling CH projects in an advanced digital ecosystem (data warehouse, data lake, open-access repository, etc.).

Original research, review articles, case studies, and research or papers focusing on the key role of data management involving digitization frameworks or digitized CH assets are accepted. Papers focusing on related issues of sustainability, digital sobriety, and cost-effective technologies to reduce the data weight in the energy crisis are also welcome. 

This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that link the following themes:

• 3D data capture for manageable heritage data;
• Range and image-based 3D reconstruction for digital documentation efficiency;
• Multimodality and data integration;
• Data science;
• Metadata and paradata;
• 3D-based information systems;
• CH data organization;
• Semantics for CH data organization.

We look forward to receiving your submissions.

Prof. Dr. Marco Gaiani
Dr. Anthony Pamart
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Heritage is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• cultural heritage
• data management
• digital heritage
• 3D scanning for CH data management
• photogrammetry for CH data management
• CH 3D-based information systems
• web-based information systems
• semantics