IT Tools for the Valorisation of the Building Heritage

According to the valorisation of sustainable policies, many European countries developed common or individual strategies to preserve and exploit their environmental and building heritage. IT tools give a strong support to manage information, to co-ordinate diagnostics activities, to guide the design planning, to facilitate public/private partnerships and to communicate manifold data. Through this international project it has been possible to create a set of specific tools, focused on different user types and needs, that are easy to be combined and applied to assess and valorise the aesthetic and economic attitude of the architectural heritage. The proposed evaluation model has been studied to define a compatible re-use strategy, both according to the planning criteria and spatial policies of the EU research area and enabling to operate on a great diversity of protected built environment typologies (in our Country: villas, gardens and rural buildings), this taking into account the specific problems of targeted users and local regulations. The designed Decision Support System (DSS) is focused on evaluating the best building use in perfect agreement with its cultural and architectural value and with the economical investment that has to be done. The choice of the building heritage as case study of this DSS allows to exploit all the IT opportunities able to manage the subtle relations given by the need of preserving the building environment but also to maximise the needed works, curbing costs. According to these main objectives and to the complexity of user requirements, we developed a set of IT tools co-ordinated through a web site, arranged into a private and public interface. The “confidential” web access is dedicated to the research partners and it’s used to exchange and manage information. The “open” web interface allows the spreading of the data, it shows the tools encouraging new partnerships and it enables transnational tourist virtual tours between all the buildings fit into the GIS and database. The Network construction ensures the dissemination of the outputs and the enlargement of the project boundaries and the involvement of many different subjects as: planners, architects, builders, local authorities, schools, cultural foundations, research institutes, private and public investment trusts, private owners and public organisations.