ABSTRACT
The research project aim is to outline the relevance, potentialities and threats of digital conservation for heritage and to suggest a vision for its future role. Digital conservation consists in the creation and storage of digital representations of buildings and objects. As known, heritage all over the world is exposed to risk: natural disasters, wars, carelessness, and it could be suddenly damaged or even destroyed. Therefore, its preservation becomes more and more crucial. The present paper points out the prominent role that digital conservation can have in heritage preservation and its unique potentialities in both before and after damage phases. It can greatly help not only in emergencies to prioritise interventions or to support in restoration projects after damages, but also and especially in the monitoring and maintenance issues even if no calamities occur and in storage of cultural memory and identity of communities. Starting from the state of the art of digital conservation, in order to understand what it practically means nowadays, its main techniques and technologies of photogrammetry and laser scanners and its methodology of HBIM have been investigated. Thanks to the insights offered by selected case studies of digital conservation application such as Carlo III Bridge in Italy and Rekrei Project in Iraq, it has become clear that, at the present, this methodology is mostly implemented in case of current restoration projects or after damages. That is why the research proposes to go beyond: it is time for a preventive digital conservation, for the digitalisation of heritage buildings starting from the ones still in place but in risky areas. Furthermore, examples like the design of Data Warehouses shows how rich and powerful the digital storage could be. Data Warehouses are digital databases that contain a wide range of information: digital drawings, HBIM models, text-based data and any other kind of information related to the building. Digital archiving is extremely accessible and allows to collect a huge amount of data. But much data is worthwhile only if it can be managed, selected, related, queried in order to become proper knowledge. In addition, professionals clarity of purposes in use of technologies and their awareness about technical limits turned out to be other key points.
