Crowd-Based Tools for Indirect Condition Assessment and Conservation of Cultural Heritage

Abstract

The enhancement of digital technologies, the diffusion of the crowdsensing paradigm envisage useful applications to cultural heritage and depict novel approaches to the condition assessment and forms of conservation and preventive conservation. A large amount of inhomogeneous data is available to the community and, therefore, effective and reliable tools able to facilitate their processing and management are needed to design proper safeguarding and valorization measures. The present paper discusses a methodology that integrates traditional approaches for the knowledge and condition assessment of cultural heritage with those based on well-known web applications available at a large scale on different devices. In other terms, it investigated the feasibility and the reliability of the crowd-sourcing paradigm applied to the acquisition of data related to the current condition of architectural and valuable assets. The methodology is applied to two relevant but different examples of the International cultural heritage, for which a flexible and scalable database has been populated. Processing of data provides encouraging results both in the area of the indirect survey and preventive conservation.