731-738

Monument inventory in the region of Central Macedonia : research project No 2604, University of Thessaloniki (R.C.M.-C.E.C.-M.MA.T)

• Βλάχος, Δ.
• Λάββας, Γεώργιος Π.

The creation, maintainance and operation of a Monument Inventory are generally recognized as mandatory for the protection, preservation and pro­motion of the architectural heritage. Moreover, a National Inventory can contribute greatly to scientific research and should constitute a basic pre­ condition for the spatial allocation of production activities and the designing of development policies. Concurrently, modern computer technology offers Amplified capabilities for the storage, processing and retrieval of geometric and morphological characteristics of monuments. The goal of this research programme is the organization of a digital computerized Monument Inventory for the region of Central Macedonia in Greece and the creation of a model to serve as the basis of a digital computerized National Inventory of Monuments.Furthermore, a decentralized organizational scheme for the inventory at a local and regional level, under the supervision of a central administration, is proposed. In comparison to conventional inventories, digital computerized archives and databases offer a lot of advantages for the registration, processing and retrieval of a vast amount of information. For the purposes of this programme, the architectural heritage was divided into four basic categories, which were called the «objects» of the inventory: a) Individual Monuments, b) Archaeo­logical Sites, c) Building Complexes and d) Settlements and/or Historic Urban Centres. Four Registration Forms were compiled to be used for the collection and storage of all sorts of information. The Registration Forms are composed of thematic entities, a number of which is common in some Forms, while others are similar in structure. These entities provide the salient facts concerning an object: name, location, ownership, ethnic and religious identification, date of construction, typological, morphological, and constructional development across time, basic references, geodetic and land surveying data, the name of the person who is responsible for the registration, the date of the survey an ce, etc. A photograph of the main facade, a plot plan and a plan of the monument are also required. Descriptive data are simply keyed in, photographs and maps are entered in the database as bit images using high resolution scanners, while other types of data, as the cartographic background, are entered using digitization techniques. The entire database is composed of a large number of sub-databases, taking full advantage of the similarities in the thematic entities of the four Registration Forms. The relation between the Registration Forms and the database is determined by an internal algorithmic technique, which is not obvious to the user. It makes the system (hardware and software) user-friendly, it reduces drastically the amount of disk space required for all sorts of data and speeds up the retrieval of simple or combined information. Although four separate Registration Forms have been designed, the database is uniform, offering the possibility to correlate the content of any information entity to any other entity on another Form. For the retrieval of combined information, keywords were supplied for each thematic entity, selected to describe in the most accurate way the main characteristics of each object. In order to show the location and the geographic distribution of any subset of the objects registered in the database, a digital cartographic background has been compiled in vector form. This feature, along with the scanned maps, the topographic plans, the scanned photographs and a short description text, allow for the printing of a single-page information sheet for each registered object. The database has been designed to support the registration of data concerning monuments of any historical era or of any region, independently of their ethnic, architectural, stylistic and geographical characteristics. Therefore it can be expanded to serve as a basis for any similar monument inventory outside the boundaries of the Region of Central Macedonia. The work carried out so far, including the software development and the information collected and stored, may be a starting point for the development of relative databases, linked to the original one. The complete land survey of individual architectural monuments, executed using three-dimensional topographic techniques, may be seen as such a database. Three-dimensional models of the monuments can be stored and retrieved on demand, in order to draw plans, sections, elevations or axonometric and perspective drawings. The capabilities of today’s high speed computer networks, academic or commercial, can allow cross searches among databases for both text and image (maps and photographs) exchange, a beneficial synthesis for scientific research and for the design of monument protection policy

• History and Archaeology

• Αρχαιολογία

μνημεία, Μακεδονία, συνέδρια