ICT and Semantic BIM Technologies for the Advanced Documentation and Condition Assessment of Cultural Heritage Sites

The paper reports the results of an ongoing research programme developed at the University of Ferrara by the spin-off INCEPTION, a start-up created on the basis of the outcomes of the project 'INCEPTION - Inclusive Cultural Heritage in Europe through 3D semantic modelling' (EC H2020-funded research project). The paper focuses on the enhancement and improvement of some tools and functionalities of the INCEPTION platform and reports the results of tests performed on the 3D model of the church of Santa Maria delle Vergini in Macerata developed in the framework of the collaboration between INCEPTION and the ICCD (Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione) of the MIC (Ministry of Culture). The first section investigate how the field of cataloging characterized by semantic web technologies, consisting of ontologies, LOD (Link Open Data), open standardized dictionaries and metadata, can be exploited for enriching H-BIM (Historical/Heritage Building Information) models thanks to the use of the INCEPTION platform. In particular, the workflow consisting of Scan2BIM procedures and advanced geometric modeling is described. Therefore, the automatic correlation and extraction of data from the New Digital Catalogue of Cultural Heritage, based on the ArCo ontology, is made possible by ontology mapping techniques and the use APIs and SPRQL queries. The results consist in a H-BIM model of Santa Maria delle Vergini that can be visualized online together with all the associated information and metadata retrieved for other sources in real-time, offering a better understanding of the church and the beautiful paintings of its altars. The BIM model of the church of Santa Maria delle Vergini was also used to test a new tool of the INCEPTION platform designed for the management of inspections, monitoring of deterioration conditions and planning of 'conservation maintenance' of cultural heritage sites and buildings. The tools for the inspection management and maintenance planning consist of a protocol for inspecting and assessing the condition of building components or parts, and applications to perform guided inspections, transfer the collected data to the platform, and later access that data by interacting directly with the building's digital twin. The paper presents the main elements of the ongoing experimentation: the matrixes for the automatic analysis of the detected data and the assignment of the "condition score", the structure of the ontology with which the semantic tools of the platform operate, the workflows for data loading phases such as: in situ inspections, remote monitoring, planning of interventions.