Concept of the project‘s technical architecture

Terrestrial Laser Scanner in medieval church

DISSEMINATIONStandards play a key role in enabling data sharing and interoperability. Our goal is to provide the user with open standards for storing and exchan-ging semantics and geometry of the data.

INSCRIPTIONS IN THEIRSPATIAL CONTEXT

SPATIAL HUMANITIES„Inscriptions in their Spatial Context – Inschriften im Bezugssystem des Raumes“ (IBR) is a joint research project by the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz and the i3mainz - Institute for Spatial Informa-tion- and Surveying-Technology. The overarching goal is to provide a generic tool and innovative methods for a better understanding of the spatial reference of objects within their architectural context. It thereby broadens the scope of digital research with the me-thods of geographical information science contribu-ting to the emerging fi eld of Spatial Humanities.

MEDIEVAL INSCRIPTIONSThe use case of the project consists of medie-val inscriptions and their spatial context within Christian architecture. Associated with paintings (images), sculptures and tombs, inscriptions have a strong impact on the signifi cance of the sur-rounding structures. Rooms and their furniture served for ritual acts and memoria; they consti-tuted references to liturgical acts. Thus, the inter-pretation of the epigraphical sources depends on a comprehensive understanding of their spatial and performative context.

Gefördert vom Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung

Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur | Mainzgeneralsekretariat@adwmainz.de

i3mainz, Institut für Raumbezogene Informations- und Messtechniki3mainz@fh-mainz.de

Partners:

DATA SETSFor more than one decade Terrestrial Laser Scan-ning (TLS) has generated huge amounts of data especially in the cultural heritage domain that contains most of the information essential for the spatial interpretation of inscriptions. At the same time, more and more epigraphical data is made available through web interfaces by several ambi-tous initiatives.

Our application is based on the DIO Catalogue (www.inschriften.net), the online edition of the corpus “Die Deutschen Inschriften”, a critical edi-tion of medieval and early modern inscriptions. Point clouds from several churches supplemented by panorama images provide the spatial informa-tion collected and processed by means of a web-based tool linking geometry to annotated epigra-phical data.

Analysis of inscriptions in their spatial and performative context

Point cloud of St. Michaelis Church, Hildesheim

GENERIC VIEWERA webtool based on HTML5 technology will allow users to store, process, reconstruct and visualize the spatial relationships among object geomet-ry, location and historical meaning. The software architecture is based on four databases: Expert Data, Annotation Store, Spatial Store and Topolo-gical Store. The Expert Store and the Annotation Store provide access to the semantic description; the Spatial Store is used for geometric and spatial representation while the Topologic Store descri-bes connections among the geometrical features of objects, their spatial location and historical con-notation.

OUTLOOKThe technological framework allows for capturing the geometry of specifi c portions of point clouds and linking it to external datasets. Moreover, it is suitable for several other applications in the cul-tural heritage domain even beyond epigraphical and architectural contexts.