Abstract
Abstract. During the last decade, we have witnessed an increased interest in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), including the so-called “Historical GIS”, 3D GIS heritage and its subcategory of “SDI for cultural heritage”. Specific literature reviews, gathering and analysing the scientific production for Culture Heritage and GIS based research questions, are currently lacking. Therefore, the overall goal of this article is to provide an objective summary of the current state-of-the-art concerning how GIS has been used and what methods and analysis have been applied in the field of cultural heritage. In this sense, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of the literature on the application of GIS in cultural heritage is carried out. To do so, the WOS and Scopus databases were considered. The results show that the dominant application of GIS is in the realisation of inventory and cataloguing of archaeological and architectural heritage. As a result of the quantitative analysis, we also verify the principal sources in which most studies have been published, highlighting the “ISPRS Archives” with 14 publications, the “Lecture Notes in Computer Science” with 9, and “Proceedings of Digital Heritage” with 6 publications. These data show that the sources that most publish mainly belong to the field of IT and Computer Science. In addition, the SLR shows that in the last three years there has been a greater tendency to use GIS to solve more specific problems of heritage through its use in conjunction with other tools such as BIM and photogrammetry.
Highlights
Information Technologies (ITs) offer a huge variety of applications in the heritage field
The empirical corpus was compiled through searches in the Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus databases with the aim of identifying the publications which dealt with Geographic Information System (GIS) and cultural heritage
The systematic review method proposed considers and combines the results of searches in two heterogenous digital databases and enables an evaluation which can be applied to other studies and analysis
Summary
Information Technologies (ITs) offer a huge variety of applications in the heritage field. The application of GIS in most works of the cultural heritage area is limited to the georeferencing of information, leaving aside their enormous potential in the analysis process. There is currently a lack of specific reviews of the literature and scientific summaries of the production concerning the use of GIS in the heritage area. The current systematic review contributes a summary of the most common challenges and problems in research. Another key section of this systematic review is to identify where the results are more solid and in which fields more research is still needed. The article finishes by providing some recommendations and future research lines
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