Urban heritage accessibility and conservation through 3D models and digital tools

One of the main challenges to be tackled today within the multidisciplinary field of Cultural Heritage is to increase the fruition, preservation and enjoyment of heritage assets. New technologies and digital cultural heritage should play an important innovative role, as well as ICT tools and digital devices represent a great opportunity to understand, access, enhance and preserve cultural heritage. This contribution understands the overall research approach toward the enhancement of the accessibility of digital cultural heritage as the ability to access cultural contents and resources by as many people as possible, using ICT functionalities and applications (web sites, data-bases, digital libraries, virtual applications, etc.) while overcoming cultural, environmental and management barriers, fostering an easier and widespread fruition. Despite the constant evolution and increasing use of digital media, there is still a lack of platforms able to collect and aggregate space-related data with information on the use and accessibility of heritage monuments, buildings and entire sites at the urban scale. Moreover, heritage conservation, accessibility and fruition are still strongly associated with buildings as, for instance, museums and monuments, yet struggling to overcome the ordinary dichotomy “object - cultural heritage asset” understanding entire urban historical areas as valuable per se, and enlarging both vision and possibilities to the urban dimension as a whole. Innovative strategies in heritage documentation could be reached through the implementation of effective data collection processes, and the development of semantically enriched 3D models; experimentation of new uses, connections and reuses of digital data applied to cultural heritage should also address a wide range of users (tourists, policy-makers, scholars, ICT-inexperienced users). In this perspective, outcomes from the project funded by the European Union “INCEPTION - Inclusive Cultural Heritage in Europe through 3D semantic modelling” (2015-2019), and coordinated by the Department of Architecture of the University of Ferrara, are presented.