“GEOHeritage” - GIS Based Application for Movable Heritage

Abstract

The paper will present the results of a research project „A methodology for mapping movable heritage”.  This project, financed by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education in 2008-2010, was realized by the Institute of Geodesy and Cartography in cooperation with the Research and Academic Computer Network (portal Polska.pl), the Central Archives of Historical Records and Department of Art History of the Wroclaw University. The idea of the project was to simplify access to digital movable cultural heritage by the use of spatial information. The main aspect of the project was to use a Geographic Information System (GIS) - as a technology and as a tool - to integrate different digital collections, present their content in one space and provide online access to them from one common level – from an online map. The essence of the research was to present on the online map movable monument as multi-spatial object. The base of this assumption is that most of monuments, especially movable ones, can have several places in the geographical space that are connected with them (several various space relations). As a rule archival documents were created in one place, describe the other, today can be kept in places far away from the place they were prepared, and what more the parts of the same collection can be kept in different archives. Moreover, one single document can be connected or have relations (typological, thematically, temporal, spatial) with other relations to the same or the other one. The reason for it is that documents concerning various places are housed in the same archive, various documents can present the same place or the place of creating particular document can be the place of housing another. In the project the basic source material was digital collections of original records. Their metadata defined in the international standards of monuments’ description were used for connecting digital monuments with the geographic space. With the use of these standards, the Internet application for presenting cultural heritage on the map was developed. It can be found at www.GEOHeritage.polska.pl (Polish version) and www.GEOHeritage.poland.pl (English version). The application is based on the Geographic Information System (GIS), and its functionality is mainly the elements of selecting the resources, presenting the documents on the map in different ways and finding their images.  The paper will present methodological solutions necessary for building on-line map of movable heritage together with the functionality of the application.