Management of Architectural Heritage Information in BIM and GIS: State-of-the-Art and Future Perspectives

Abstract

Information management technology is widely used in a variety of fields and it proved its great potentials also for the Cultural Heritage (CH) sector. Considering the management of architectural heritage information, there exists a distinctive factor which does not exist in any other field: a multi-layered spatial character in the third (or even fourth) dimension. Moreover the semantical enrichment of three-dimensional (3D) digital models by integrating heterogeneous datasets has a crucial importance. Nevertheless, the organization and structuring of such information is considerably difficult although very useful for better conservation and management purposes. Accordingly, researchers have recently developed different techniques for the coherent and reliable management of information related to architectural heritage. The approaches so far developed have pros and cons since data processing and visualization is not a simple and straight-forward process. The paper presents a review of the current management approaches for architectural heritage information with Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools, illustrating up-to-date approaches and describing possible future research directions.