This is an overview on the use of GIS technology in cultural heritage. It represents the updated version of the report paper (Petrescu, 2007), which was presented at the XXI CIPA Symposium held in Athens, Greece in 2007. The updating process started in 2018, follows a new methodology presented below and was initiated by the author of the first version, who coordinated the activity of a group of 21 students. The main source of information for the overview consisted of the papers presented at CIPA Symposia. The overview is not a CIPA report. It has several authors, as it is the result of the collaborative efforts of all those who have been involved in writing it. They are all mentioned in the Authors section of the overview, along with their individual contribution.

The overview highlights the relation between national spatial data infrastructures (NSDI) and the use of GIS technology in cultural heritage. The world urbanization goes on at a high pace and puts a lot of pressure on cultural heritage land use, mainly because of infrastructure and real-estate development projects. Consequently, a strong relation between NSDI and specific cultural heritage spatial data provides a better legal protection to monuments and sites. That is why, for each country, this type of relation is emphasized, whenever data were identified. Of course, digital technologies are involved, including GIS technology in particular. In this way, the urban and/or regional planning activities, such as different types of masterplans, can easily consider cultural heritage objectives, based on up-to-date and accurate spatial information.

Another important feature of the overview consists in its attempt to identify different territorial levels of implementation of GIS technology in cultural heritage. For each country, three levels are considered: local, intermediate (regional) and national. Local level refers the use of GIS technology in the framework of a single monument or site, while the national level refers its use within a nation-wide implementation. All other cases are referred as belonging to the intermediate level; of course, there is a great diversity of such cases, usually depending on the administrative structure of the country and/or the territorial distribution of the cultural heritage objectives under study. Thus, the following cases illustrate three specific instances: a) GIS implementation for the monuments and sites in a city, such as Vienna Cultural Property - the digital cultural map of Vienna (Wien Kulturgut), or b) GIS implementation for an area where several  monuments are placed, such as Troodos Mountain in Cyprus, where a UNESCO World Heritage List item consisting of ten painted Byzantine churches is located (Agapiou et al, 2008), or c) an implementation at a state level, such as “State-wide Inventories of Heritage Resources: MACRIS and the Experience in Massachusetts” (Stott, 2017).

A distinct treatment is reserved to international projects: a reference to the project is provided within the Projects/Links section and, at the same time, each international project is referred inside the webpage of each participant country. For instance, the Andean Road System (Duperré, 2017) or “Managing Cultural Heritage Underwater” - MACHU project (Manders 2010).

OVERVIEW STRUCTURE

The overview includes 5 main sections, Countries/Regions, About, References, Project/Links, Authors as described in the following.
About is the section providing general information, including also some preliminary considerations and the methodology used for performing the overview.
References section includes the list of all the references presented in the overview, alphabetically ordered, and following the rules defined in Guidelines for Authors Preparing Manuscripts for Publication in the ISPRS Archives and the ISPRS Annals. Thus, a reference might be a paper published in a journal, a book, a website, software version, and so on. Whenever available, each reference has an active link to the web-address where the original information can be viewed. Actually, in the current version released in January 2020 all the links are active and were checked on January 20, 2020. The last line of each reference contains the list of the countries/regions related to that reference; the countries/regions are referred by their two-letter acronym country codes, as presented in ISO website, having a link to the corresponding country webpage in the overview.
Countries/Regions section presents the "countries / geographic regions" of the world in alphabetical order following the same approach as ISPRS, which is one of the parent organizations of CIPA. Consequently, country names are listed for the sake of brevity and common usage and are not intended to carry political or diplomatic implications. Within this section of the overview there is a webpage allocated to each country, which contains: a) a paragraph synthesizing the public information collected for the country; b) information about the use of GIS in cultural heritage provided mainly by ISPRS, ICOMOS and/or CIPA members; c) list of references regarding the country; these references are also included in the full list displayed in the Reference section.
The Authors section of the website includes all the contributors who provided input to the overview, along with a short description of their individual contribution.
The Projects/Links section includes also a list, inherently incomplete, of the projects that are relevant to the use of GIS in cultural heritage.

PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS

The use of GIS technology in cultural heritage explosively proliferated during the last decade. Basically, this happened because of
a) the need for spatial databases at different territorial levels of operation, from local (e.g. monument, site) to national and international level, and
b) the need for implementing spatial data infrastructures, no matter if they are thematic or territorial oriented.

GIS proved to be a valuable tool for recording and documenting cultural heritage under various threats, including armed conflicts such as the case of Middle East and North Africa (Sheldrick et al., 2017). This technology proved to be flexible enough to be applied in crowdsourcing environments (Sylaiou et al., 2013). 3D model applications (Prechtel et al., 2013) and, on another hand, integration of GIS and Building Information Modelling matured enough to shift from research phase to applications in real world cases (Logothetis et al., 2017).

Various direct or indirect national and international legislation, initiatives, projects, programs have been implemented or are under current development. Due to their impact and to the pioneering ideas they were based on three of them are mentioned below: RecorDIM, INSPIRE and ARCHES.

RecorDIM (Recording, Documentation and Information Management) was a project organized by Getty Conservation Institute, between 2003 and 2007, one of its main partners being CIPA. Its main impact consisted in promoting the paradigm of “bridging the gap (…) between the information users (researchers, conservation specialists of all trades, project managers, planners etc.) and the information providers (photographers, heritage recorders, photogrammetrists, surveyors, etc.)” as it is mentioned on the homepage of the project. The idea behind RecorDIM “was to improve conservation practice by improving the ability of professionals to gather, create, manage, and interpret documentation” (Getty Conservation Institute, 2010). The GIS technology was considered as an important instrument for achieving the project objectives, and, therefore, one of the task groups of the project was “Generic GIS Template for the Management of Heritage Places”.

INSPIRE is the acronym of the European Union’s Directive establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community, which entered into force on May 15, 2007. INSPIRE is a good-practice example of what can be done when the legal framework assists and promotes solutions to complex geo-spatial issues. The directive recognized the importance of using GIS in cultural heritage; consequently, one of the thematic layers considered by INSPIRE is “Protected Sites”, which includes cultural heritage monuments and sites.

ARCHES is an open-source GIS and web-based software developed by Getty Conservation Institute in cooperation with World Monuments Fund, its first version being released in October 2013. It is designed as a geospatially enabled platform for cultural heritage inventory and management. ARCHES already became a solution for more and more organizations (Jan, 2018), (Myers et al, 2016)

METHODOLOGY

The methodology used for achieving the present overview is oriented on the activity of CIPA. Thus, the main sources of information are the papers presented at CIPA International Symposia since 2007 onwards. Also, other related scientific conferenced were considered. The initial phase of the overview consisted in “raw data collection” and was performed by a team of 23 contributors from the Urban Engineering and Regional Development Department of the Technical University of Civil Engineering Bucharest, who are mentioned in the Authors section of the website. The overview is oriented on the location where GIS technology is applied. Consequently, the raw data were collected and organized country/region by country/region.

The second stage, which is designed to be periodically applied, consists of two steps. In the first one, for each country/region, a concise synthesis accompanied by the relevant references identified from all the collected data is provided; the initial version of the synthesis is mainly focused on a) the way the national spatial data infrastructure deals with cultural heritage information and b) the attempt of identification of the implementation levels related to GIS use in cultural heritage. If the data about NSDI and/or implementation levels are poor then only some references are provided, if discovered. The second step includes corrections and improvements provided mainly by ISPRS, ICOMOS and CIPA members, after checking the information related to their country/region.

It should be noted that the actual methodology differs from the one applied in 2007, the former being based on the input received from the CIPA national delegates, exclusively. This is due to the fact that, since 2008, ICOMOS removed this category of membership from the international scientific committees.

WHY A WEBSITE?

Usually, a paper is updated by a new paper. Why updating through a website? There are several reasons for that, but the most important one is the tremendous spread of the use of this technology during the last decade, and, consequently, a huge amount of information that has to be considered. Thus, it is unrealistic to comprehensively update the 2007 report in a conference paper due to the inherent short dimension accepted in such cases, which, inevitably, will lead to severe reduction and truncation of the presented information. It should be mentioned that, nevertheless, an attempt was made to publish the overview as an article based on the data collected and processed until March 2019; the attempt failed mainly because it presented inherently unconsolidated and severely truncated information, while the relation between the paper, the website and CIPA was confusing and misleading. The lesson learned from that attempt was to build a consolidated overview by applying the methodology presented above, and publish it as a website, which stand as an instrument conferring high accessibility and visibility to the overview. At the same time, in order to continue providing quality information, the main source for data collection is represented by the CIPA symposia as well as other related scientific conferences.

20 YEARS AFTER

About 20 years ago, in 1999, Richard A. Engelhardt, acting as UNESCO Regional Advisor for Culture, in Asia and the Pacific mentioned in his preface at "GIS and Cultural Resource Management: A Manual for Heritage Managers" (Box, 1999) that: