Innovative strategies for the planned conservation of architectural heritage

The paper will focus on planned conservation issues with regards to strategies that technological innovation, such as the use of GIS applications in the architectural field, provides to the conservation process. Drafting a conservation plan requires the management of several multi-disciplinary data (i.e. thematic database) that, only if properly integrated, will allow stating correct assessments. On the contrary, an inefficient management of data complexity may produce an inappropriate plan. The availability of computer tools able to collect and organize large amounts of information undoubtedly facilitates the management of the procedures provided for the conservation plan. Consequently, in this scenario, it is crucial to use GIS technology, which combines the databases management with geometrical and spatial referencing. The Geographic Information Systems, initially developed in urban and territorial research fields, find effective application even in a strictly architectural scope, not only on conservation plans, but also on the management, up to the detail scale, of architectural elevations. The system enables the management of a georelational model in which there is a direct topological relationship between the stored data and the restoration project: the entities of graphical model (points, lines and polygons) are associated to data structures with the definition of topological relations (adjacent, closeness, overlap, inclusion, etc.).