Abstract
Abstract. Historical small urban centres are of increasing interest to different interacting fields such as architectural heritage protection and conservation, urban planning, disaster response, sustainable development and tourism. They are defined at different levels (international, national, regional), by various organizations and standards, incorporate numerous aspects (natural and built environment, infrastructures and open spaces, social, economic, and cultural processes, tangible and intangible heritage) and face various challenges (urbanization, globalization, mass tourism, climate change, etc.). However, their current specification within large-scale geospatial databases is similar to those of urban areas in a broad sense resulting in the loss of many aspects forming this multifaceted concept. The present study considers the available ontologies and data models, coming from various domains and having different granularities and levels of detail, to represent historical small urban centres information. The aim is to define the needs for extension and integration of them in order to develop a multidisciplinary, integrated semantic representation. Relevant conventions and other legislation documents, ontologies and standards for cultural heritage (CIDOC-CRM, CRMgeo, Getty Vocabularies), 3D city models (CityGML), building information models (IFC) and regional landscape plans are analysed to identify concepts, relations, and semantic features that could form a holistic semantic model of historical small urban centres.
Highlights
Historical small urban centres are of increasing interest for both the cultural heritage and landscape communities, and land planners
Ontologies are considered as conceptual structures for formalizing the explicit knowledge of a domain
We considered the analysis of conventions and legislation documents from UNESCO and ICOMOS, ontologies and standards for cultural heritage (CIDOC-CRM, CRMgeo, Getty Vocabularies), 3D city models (CityGML) as well as building information models (IFC) and regional landscape plans that could provide the basis for developing a richer and more granular semantic formalization
Summary
Historical small urban centres are of increasing interest for both the cultural heritage and landscape communities, and land planners. The HUL proposes a participatory use of planning so as to involve the communities and the many stakeholders in the decision-making process, especially taking into consideration the vulnerability in relation to the anthropogenic pressure and climate change, and above all to consider the integration of urban heritage values into broad urban development strategies. Since these are very general considerations, but basic and underlying a new way of considering urban heritage, the opportunity “to undertake comprehensive surveys and mapping of the city’s natural, cultural and human resources” is explicitly reported and specific implementation methods will have to be developed.
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