Knowledge-Based Approach for the Digitalization and Analysis of Historic Built Heritage: Application in a Calabrian Context (Italy)

The conservation process is iterative and interactive. Periodic updates stratify data across disciplines and time. Still the transition from raw data to structured knowledge is often slowed by procedural gaps and tooling limitations, creating a semantic divide between abundant digital resources and truly intelligible data. This article proposes a methodological and operational approach for managing the continuity of the information flow within a digitalization process functional to a conservation strategy for the Historical Built Heritage. A graph-structured semantic knowledge base was developed and it is fed by data from heterogeneous sources (Building Information Modeling, reality-based annotation platforms and graph databases), organized according to an explicit conceptual model for representing the building’s diachronic evolution. Interaction and querying are mediated by a prototypical multidimensional visualization environment. The experimentation has proven to anticipate contextualization, to rationalize mapping, to harmonize heterogeneous resources, and to formalize knowledge for sharing and querying. Calabrian heritage, which is part of the region’s identity and subject to natural and anthropogenic risks, is the case of interest. Application scenarios are exemplified in the experiment on San Giovannello, Gerace (RC).