An evolutionary approach to digital recording and information about heritage sites

This paper considers 3 cases undertaken by a team at the University of the West of England (FBE/UWE) --- the Tower of London Computer Models and more recent linked European Historic Gardens on the Web. The team is continuing to investigate uses of spatial information systems to store, manage and visualise records of historic sites, enabling interactive off-site access to interpretative information. Existing records, often accrued in an ad-hoc manner, are mostly inadequate for such use and incomplete without external contextual reference to the physical heritage site for complete understanding. They are in this respect 'uncoordinated', lacking independent coherence. By contrast explicit integrated codification of similar digital data is necessary for stand-alone remote access. Such use necessarily starts with accumulation of an archive of data but ought to proceed to being able to answer locational questions such as 'where' and 'when' and ultimately to the support of strategic analysis and 'what-if' speculation.While buildings are relatively slow to change and decay, so past records and now computer modeled analogues stay valid in the long term, yet their contexts, settings, gardens and grounds are open to rapid change. Effective recording of potentially rapid change is highly resource intensive, justifying exploration of automated data capture, usually satellite imaging at the macro, and remote controlled video at the micro levels. Yet automated capture creates additional problems for record management, storage and retrieval in which few heritage organisations have achieved maturity. Experts often cannot obtain the precise interpretation from a photo that they can make in person on site, so melding such interpreted information with rapidly changing imagery is also an issue discussed in this paper.