From survey to analysis for cultural heritage management: a new proposal for database design in BIM

The need to safeguard and preserve Cultural Heritage (CH) is increasing and especially in Italy, where the amount of historical buildings is considerable, having efficient and standardized processes of CH management and conservation becomes strategic. At the time being, there are no tools capable of fulfilling all the specific functions required by Cultural Heritage documentation and, due to the complexity of historical assets, there are no solution as flexible and customizable as CH specific needs require. Nevertheless, BIM methodology can represent the most effective solution, on condition that proper methodologies, tools and functions are made available. The thesis work, presented here, aims to give a concrete answer to the lack of specific tools tailored for Cultural Heritage documentation. It addresses the implementation of a BIM system aimed at maintenance, conservation and restoration of Cultural Heritage. BIM methodology is addressed from a geomatics perspective, giving on the one hand a contribution especially to survey and database implementation, and, on the other hand, interfacing with other disciplines actors, in order to collaborate and share objectives and strategies.In particular, a specifically designed database was implemented, where all data about the historical building can be stored. A tailored database is necessary to organize historical data that generally are not standardized, have a complex structure and are fuzzy in their description. The application was implemented with the specific aim of providing tools also for non- AEC experts: it gives user-friendly graphical interfaces to access the data and makes available tools for data entry, element modelling, attribute query and thematic mapping.It can be integrated into the main commercial BIM software (at the moment the experimentation has been limited to Revit) or accessed via web. One of the main goals was not to be bounded to a specific software and to make the system usable on a larger scale.Database design and system usability have been the most investigated topics, since to date there are still few studies concerning the organization of semantic data, system usability and data sharing. Nevertheless, all the aspects concerning the application of BIM process to historical assets (level of accuracy, compliance with the surveyed data, parameterization of complex elements, management of deformations and irregularities, integration of pre-existing databases) have been addressed, in order to define a complete methodology.The Cathedral of Parma was chosen as case study to test the methodology, but the system was implemented to be flexible and customizable, in order to apply this methodology to a wide range of historical assets.