Survey, Modeling, and Documentation for Preservation: Digitization Challenges towards Cultural Heritage Enhancement and Conservation

Fostering digital technologies to record, document, and preserve Europe’s Cultural Heritage and their accessibility is one of the main challenges nowadays. The great potential of 3D digital modeling and representation to new ways of visualization and data management can lead to new avenues of understanding, enhancement, and conservation of Cultural Heritage. Applications in digitization fields can be helpful to minor or unknown Heritage sites or Heritage at risk; moreover, Digital Cultural Heritage is a highly interdisciplinary field, in which contaminations of integrated skills are merged. This inter-sectorial value is the key factor in gathering the inclusive involvement of different users, which is the starting point for fruitful interdisciplinary cultural contamination and cross-disciplinary dialogue. This contribution will present the latest achievements by two funded and concluded European Projects focused on digitization challenges. The first one focusing on efficient 3D digitization methods and tools for enriched semantic modeling; the second one on policies, strategic decision making, and the use of breakthrough technological developments and their impact on Digital Cultural Heritage and Virtual Museums. The main outcomes of these H2020 project activities will be summarized by presenting methodologies and demonstration cases developed by applying digitization, modeling, and web-based solutions, and cross-institutional and interdisciplinary synergies activated in the field of Digital Cultural Heritage