Sistema Informativo Generale del Catalogo: nuovi strumenti per la gestione integrata delle conoscenze sui beni archeologici

Maria Letizia Mancinelli

«Archeologia e Calcolatori» 2004, 15, 115-128

Abstract

The Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation (ICCD), a body of the Ministry of Cultural Resources and Activities that handles the cataloguing and documentation of Italy's cultural heritage, recently concluded the project undertaken for the creation of the General Cataloguing Information System (SIGEC), an effort focused on making possible the integrated management of the different types of information - alpha-numeric, multimedia, geographic - available on the resources. An especially interesting aspect of the SIGEC, and one of its strengths, is the possibility of cross-referencing the informative data on the resources to their home territory, revealing the logical, historical and spatial relations between the environmental and anthropogenic elements, as well as the other entities of cultural interest, found in a given geographic setting. The result is an improved and better informed knowledge of the resources in question, which are placed in their proper context of time and space. While these considerations are valid for all types of cultural resources, they are especially pertinent to the archaeological heritage, which, as tangible evidence of past civilisations, takes on particular value and meaning at the precise moment in which it is placed in the historical and territorial context in which it originated and existed. The complexity and variety of the cultural resources have made it necessary to formulate specific technological and cataloguing tools with which, under the SIGEC, the geographic data generated by the customary GIS instruments is correlated with the descriptive information obtained on the resources, as well as with the sum total of the relevant documentation (graphic materials, images, multimedia pieces). In the specific case of archaeological resources, both the measures currently in force and those being updated or drawn up for the first time have been supplemented with the core information necessary for the application of the functions of the system. In addition, the cataloguing standards have been reformulated, creating a multifaceted structure in which the chart for the Archaeological Site (SI) serves as the historical-territorial reference framework for the other types of charts (SAS, Stratigraphic Survey; MA-CA, Archaeological Monument - Archaeological Complex; RA, Archaeological Artefact; NU, Numismatics; TMA, Table of Materials), making it possible to determine the space-time context of the resources described therein.

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