Documenting Spatial and Tempral Information for Heritage Preservation: A Case Study of Sri Lanka

Cultural Heritage Properties (CHPs) around the world have been altered or destroyed due to various unforeseen factors, both natural and human-made. Consequently, as a preparedness approach around such disasters, documenting the CHPs are crucial to any efforts to repair, rebuild or relocate them. With advancements in digital technologies, integrating them into our documentation to improve heritage preservation has become a common approach. Here the main concern is on Spatial and Temporal (ST) information and the paper proposes that with recent developments in the field of Geospatial technologies, heritage preservation can be enhanced and improved by documenting ST information parallel to the other information resources. The study area of this research is the CHPs in Sri Lanka. The paper investigates the present condition of the ST information in the heritage arena and the challenges associated with the same. Finally, the paper suggests a metadata standard to acquire primary level ST information as the initial ST documentation strategy. This can be extended further as a complete standard of good practice for CHP documentation in Sri Lanka.
The 12th annual meeting of the Document Academy (DOCAM), 2015 Days: 20-22 July, 2015 Place: Sydney, Australia Theme: Documents Unbounded