Intra-site Level Cultural Heritage Documentation: Combination of Survey, Modeling and Imagery Data in a Web Information System

Cultural heritage documentation induces the use of computerized techniques to manage and preserve the information produced. Geographical information systems have proved their potentialities in this scope, but they are not always adapted for the management of features at the scale of a particular archaeological site. Moreover, computer applications in archaeology are often technology driven and software constrained. Thus, we propose a tool that tries to avoid these difficulties. We are developing an information system that works over the Internet and that is joined with a web site. Aims are to assist the work of archaeological sites managers and to be a documentation tool about these sites, dedicated to everyone. We devote therefore our system both to the professionals who are in charge of the site, and to the general public who visits it or who wants to have information on it. The system permits to do exploratory analyses of the data, especially at spatial and temporal levels. We propose to record metadata about the archaeological features in XML and to access these features through interactive 2D and 3D representations, and through queries systems (keywords and images). The 2D images, photos, or vectors are generated in SVG, while 3D models are generated in X3D. Archaeological features are also automatically integrated in a MySQL database. The web site is an exchange platform with the information system and is written in PHP. Our first application case is the medieval castle of Vianden, Luxembourg.