Digitalisation of asset management in Chinese temples in Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper presents the efforts to digitalise the asset management of Chinese temples in Hong Kong, which is a new trial in the industry. To revitalise these unique heritage buildings and empower the temples’ administration with digital tools, three Chinese temples in Ap Lei Chau and Aberdeen directly administrated by the Chinese Temples Committee (CTC) were selected as pilot projects where a digital twin was developed to enable digital asset management. Laser scanning technologies were encompassed, integrated with close-range terrestrial photogrammetry to generate precise 3D Building Information Modelling (BIM). An asset information management platform was built to consolidate the operation data and establish a common data environment to support data-driven management, with parameters collected from Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and Digital Works Supervision System (DWSS) statistics consolidated. Moreover, Augmented Reality (AR) was leveraged for tourism and education, and different phases of historic temples were modelled to present the evolution and culture over time. Through this project, in addition to the higher operation efficiency enabled by the digitalised workflow and consolidated data source, a digital blueprint was built through the formulation of a digitalisation roadmap, which contains customised recommendations on cutting-edge digital tools’ implementation in relation to heritage monuments. This can be extended to 24 Chinese temples in the future as well.