A Digital Data Curation-Based Photogrammetric Acquisition Methodology for Cultural Heritage, expanded with CIDOC CRM Compatibility: protocol BeA-PG

Abstract

The increasing digitalization of cultural heritage assets and the exponential expansion of digital repositories have created new opportunities for archaeological documenting, preservation, and dissemination. Photogrammetry, a survey approach that uses photographic acquisitions to construct highly detailed 3D models of objects, buildings, and landscapes, is one of the most promising techniques in this field. The effectiveness of the photogrammetric process, however, has still limitations due to a lack of experience sharing and data interoperability, which have resulted from the singularities of the techniques in both process and data format. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel workflow for the photogrammetric process, called BeA-PG, developed for the BeArchaeo archaeological project. BeA-PG implements two relevant features for improving the effectiveness: on the one hand, sharing is improved by widening the scope of the process representation from the specific archaeological context to the broader cultural heritage context, by adopting the Digital Data Curation process abstraction; on the other, it improves the interoperability by describing the process with a shared ontological vocabulary, namely the CIDOC-CRM model. The paper introduces the major features of the photogrammetric process, its description through the abstract flow of the Digital Data Curation process, and its encoding through the CIDOC-CRM vocabulary. We illustrate the BeA-PG workflow and its experimental application in the practical setting of the BeArchaeo project.