Anyone who has worked in cultural heritage documentation will recognise a common challenge: different institutions often record similar information in different ways.
Imagine, for example, that several teams are documenting historic buildings. They may all record the building’s name, location, construction phases, materials, condition, previous interventions, photographs, drawings or three-dimensional (3D) models. However, they may organise and describe this information differently.
For people, these differences are often easy to understand. We can look at two records and recognise that they refer to the same type of object or feature. For computers, however, this is much more difficult. When information is structured differently, it becomes harder to combine datasets, search across collections or transfer information from one digital platform to another.
Building Blocks help address these challenges by providing shared models that define how different types of information should be organised and described. This allows institutions to use common structures when documenting cultural heritage assets, making it easier to exchange and reuse data.
The idea is similar to agreeing on a common documentation form. If several organisations agree on what information to record about a historic building and how to organise it, combining and comparing their records becomes much easier. The difference is that a Building Block does not contain information about a particular building. Instead, it defines a common structure that can document many different buildings.
But a Building Block goes beyond a traditional form.
It can also define what each piece of information means, how it relates to other information, which international standards should be used and what rules the data must follow. Because these rules can be interpreted by software, computers can automatically check whether the information has been recorded correctly.
Building Heritage Information Piece by Piece
One of the main advantages of Building Blocks is that they let cultural heritage information be organised into smaller, specialised, reusable models, rather than creating a single complex model meant to cover every possible aspect of heritage documentation.
Each Building Block focuses on describing a particular type of information. For example, one might define how to document a heritage site, another how to describe a building within that site, and another how to record architectural spaces such as rooms, courtyards or galleries.
Other Building Blocks may be used to document activities, such as architectural surveys, or their digital outputs, including photographs, drawings, point clouds and 3D models.
An architectural survey is the process of measuring and documenting the geometry of a building or one of its elements. It can be carried out using traditional measurement techniques, photogrammetry or 3D laser scanning. The collected information can then be used to produce drawings, point clouds, and three-dimensional models that digitally represent the building.
It is therefore useful to distinguish between the survey, which is the activity through which information is collected, and the 3D model, which may be one of its outputs.
These Building Blocks can be connected to one another.
Imagine that we want to document a historic palace. We could use one Building Block to describe the heritage site, another for the buildings that form part of it, and another for the rooms within those buildings.
If we carry out a laser scanning survey of one of those rooms, we could use another Building Block to record that activity: who performed the survey, when it took place, which instruments were used and which space was documented.
Finally, we could use a specific Building Block to describe the resulting 3D model and link it to the survey from which it was produced.
This way, we can document not only the palace and its spaces, but also how we created its digital documentation and how the different pieces of information relate to one another.
Moreover, not every project needs to use the same Building Blocks. A project focused on creating an inventory of historic buildings may only need the components used to describe buildings and architectural spaces. By contrast, a project focused on 3D documentation and conservation may also include components for surveys, 3D models, and condition assessments.
The advantage is that both projects can use the same reference models for the information they have in common, without having to design them again.
Building Blocks therefore provide reusable components that projects and institutions can select, combine and connect according to their needs, making it easier for information produced by different teams to remain compatible.
Connecting Heritage Documentation Practices with Existing Standards
HERITALISE is not trying to create an entirely new way to describe cultural heritage from scratch.
The cultural heritage, geospatial and built-environment communities have already invested considerable effort in developing standards for describing heritage assets, buildings, places, documentation processes and digital resources.
The challenge is that these standards can be complex, and it is not always clear how to apply them to the information routinely produced in cultural heritage projects.
Building Blocks help establish this connection.
They take specific needs, for example, “we need to describe a historic building and link it to the digital survey documenting it”, and translate them into clear, reusable models for organising that information, while maintaining links to recognised standards.
This means that Building Blocks do not replace international standards. Instead, they make those standards easier to apply in practice. They let institutions use existing standards to define specific information structures that software systems can interpret and validate.
In this sense, Building Blocks act as a bridge between standards and the information that cultural heritage professionals actually create and use.
And this is particularly important for HERITALISE: the aim is not simply to define how cultural heritage information should be structured in theory, but to make it easier for information created by different people, institutions and digital tools to be connected, validated, exchanged and, ultimately, reused
