Articles by Sofia Pescarin

Introduction to the Supplement 2, 2009.

Virtual Rome Project (www.virtualrome.it) has developed a VR Web-GIS application, with front-end and back-end on line solutions, for the interpretation, reconstruction and 3D exploration of archaeological and potential historical landscapes of Rome. The paper discusses the collaborative environment developed by the project for the back-end.

In this paper the authors present the approach in the study and reconstruction of archaeological landscapes that has characterized their work carried out at CINECA Supercomputing Center of Bologna, in the Visualization lab (VISIT lab), and in the Institute of Technologies Applied to Cultural Heritage of CNR (CNR-ITABC). The digital pipeline defined in these years of work has lead to the reconstruction of actual landscape (and archaeological landscape is part of our contemporaneity), past landscape, and ecosystems. The presented methodological model is a relational model that uses both bottom-up (data processing from fieldwork with integrated technologies) and top-down (landscape reconstruction through conceptual models, comparative analysis and mental maps) approaches. Landscape virtual museums can be built as ecosystems made of models and dynamic behaviors, where data can be read in a transparent way because of their association with a visible ontology. The proposed digital protocol is defined by procedures, tools (hardware and software), exchangeable data/formats and technologies such as GIS, OpenGL graphic libraries, terrain generators, Open Source software. It integrates 2D spaces and 3D, raster and vector, grid and polygonal models, text and multimedia, with the goal of offering a real time access to cultural and environmental information through off-line and on-line Virtual Reality applications and, in the future, virtual communities that could share experiences in and of the same spatial 3D landscape-mindscape.

How can an approach that at first seemed looking like a confused bazaar, from which just a miracle could let come out a stable and coherent system, work? If open source is demonstrating its success in the IT sector, can this approach be successfully applied also to the Cultural Heritage field? Integration, interdisciplinarity, participation, data sharing are key words of an open project, together with web use. In fact the use of the Internet will increasingly become not only a medium to communicate, often marginally, final results, but a real working tool. The paper will analyze a possible use of open source in archaeology, describing pro and contra of its use and comparing the characteristics of an open project with those of an archaeological one, underlying similarities and differences. A specific and new type of application will be described: VRwebGIS that will open new perspectives such as the interactive reconstruction of shared 3D web-based archaeological environments.