3D digital cultural heritage for resilience, recovery and sustainability. The inception project

Today, we are experiencing growing evidence of severe and accelerated climate impacts on cultural heritage worldwide and the need to reduce the increasingly urgent risk conditions for heritage and associated tourism economies. Together with risk reduction strategies, research activities developed the targeted use of technologies for the digitisation of the cultural heritage. In fact, the European Commission promoted several initiatives focused on digitisation and digital preservation, starting from the Research and Innovation programme Horizon 2020, investing in the development of digital tools and cutting-edge technologies to support cultural heritage. Among funded projects on digital cultural heritage, there is the INCEPTION project - Inclusive Cultural Heritage in Europe through 3D semantic modelling - that has been also recently mentioned in the “Declaration of cooperation on advancing digitisation of cultural heritage”. INCEPTION focuses on efficient 3D digitization methods, enriched semantic modeling and, web- based solutions to ensure wide access of heritage contents to experts and non-experts. The project, coordinated by the Department of Architecture - University of Ferrara, has resulted in an innovative start-up company, INCEPTION Srl, accredited as a spin-off of the University of Ferrara, providing different actors with software solutions based upon the INCEPTION Core Engine for managing, visualising and archiving 3D or BIM models and all the related digital documents, aggregated by semantic technologies. Latest results and developments, including a collaboration with the Central Institute for Catalogues and Documentation, are presented in this paper with the aim of exploring further possibilities opened by technologies developed within the project.