From 10 to 11 May, Rome hosted the Esri Italia Conference, an event that gathered more than 2000 specialists on Geographic Information System- GIS technologies. This year, the conference dedicated a session to “New tools for the valorisation of Cultural Heritage”, during which the GIS expert from PROCULTHER-NET team introduced its app for collecting cultural heritage data from the field
By Pierluigi Cara, GIS Senior Analyst, Italian Civil Protection Department- DPC
From 10 to 11 May, Rome hosted the Esri Italia Conference, an event that gathered more than 2000 specialists on Geographic Information System- GIS technologies. This year, the conference dedicated a session to “New tools for the valorisation of Cultural Heritage”, during which the GIS expert from PROCULTHER-NET team introduced its app for collecting cultural heritage data from the field.
The Esri Italia Conference is an unmissable event in Italy for experts and professionals, as well as users and providers who wish to share the state-of-the-art technologies and best practices in the industry, discover new geospatial solutions and learn about the most innovative trends in GIS field.
The thematic session on “New Tools for the Enhancement of Cultural Heritage”, proposed among the “User Case & Best Practice”, allowed to share PROCULTHER-NET’s digital instruments for the collection of digital data on the field for the assessment of damage to cultural heritage. In this framework, Pierluigi Cara, GIS Senior Analyst and member of the DPC group of experts supporting PROCULTHER-NET implementation, presented the automated version of the templates for the assessment of damage on cultural heritage in case of disaster based on ArcGIS Survey 123 app. The templates used were those shared by PROCULTHER in the “Key elements of a European methodology to address the protection of cultural heritage during emergencies”, copies of which were also distributed in the room, as well as other information material on the ongoing project PROCULTHER-NET.
All session participants highly appreciated the main features of this application: the ease in performing the task of field data collection, the speed and safety in storing and sharing collected data, the automatic production of customized reports and the availability of the form’s interfaces, accessible in addition to English, in all languages of the project partners, i.e., French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish. Finally, all the geo-referenced data can be viewed in a dashboard available on the Web which summarizes the main data insights.
The app was also successfully tested during the “Protecting Cultural Heritage Course- PCH”, the first European interdisciplinary training course entirely dedicated to the protection of cultural heritage at risk that PROCULTHER-NET organized in two sessions with around 60 participants from 24 countries in March 2023.
