Different counters: The Silk Roads CHRIS is fully 
configurable. For this project, three spatial scales were defined 
(1) a global scale with an overview of the whole Silk Roads 
network (2) a regional scale with the corridors and (3) a local 
scale where the nominated area and buffer zones of the sites are 
visualized. Different counters give thus access to these levels of 
information and associated tools, e.g. editing, as a function of 
the corridor and user profile configured with a specific menu. 
Due to the interoperable character of the system, more corridors 
and sites can be added at any time. To show the capabilities of 
the system, these counters were populated with data collected 
from the State Parties on sites that are already on the WH List, 
and the data gathered by the ICOMOS Silk Roads Thematic 
Study (Williams & Wordsworth 2010). This data was first 
prepared to create the different layers and the corresponding 
symbology (Styled Layer Descriptors). These layers were then 
uploaded to the system and GeoServer was used to configure 
the web services giving access to these layers via the GeoCMS. 
Background Maps: The Google Maps API was used to 
implement satellite and map background layers in the Silk 
Roads CHRIS demonstrator provide rich and updated 
contextual information of relevance to the stakcholders as 
illustrated in Figure 2. The advantage of Google Maps is that its 
service offers good performance and is stable as well as usually 
available. High-resolution images can be freely consulted via 
Google Maps satellite view, which provides high-resolution 
recent satellite and aerial images all over the world. The main 
disadvantages of Google Maps are that Google reserves the 
right to include advertising in the map images provided through 
the service and that they can limit the number of requests. In 
addition, Google Maps operates with the Mercator projection 
system, which implies that all datasets with WGS84 coordinates 
must be reprojected, a task done by GeoServer. 
    
  
  
  
Figure 2: Corridor map © Silk Roads CHRIS. 
Nomination dossier for corridors and component parts: An 
editable nomination dossier including all the information 
required by the Operational Guidelines (Annex 5) (UNESCO 
2011) was also designed and implemented. It contains not only 
the information available for a given corridor to be nominated 
on the WH List but also its geographical information as well as 
linked counters and component parts (Figure 3). Different kinds 
of data can be added to the GeoCMS, from texts to photos to 
advanced 3D models. The more accurate the information, the 
casier it will be for the State Parties later on to both monitor and 
report the changes in time, and make informed decisions. 
    
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Figure 3: Nomination Dossier © Silk Roads CHRIS. 
  
Vector Data in the Silk Roads CHRIS: The GeoCMS allows 
for creating or modifying the delineation of the nominated area 
and buffer zone for each component part. By opening the 
component part model in edit mode, the user will be able to 
draw and reshape with simple clicks the boundaries based on 
the Google Maps background data (See Figure 4). 
Based on this geometry, the area of the nominated area and 
buffer zones is calculated by using the getArea function from 
the Geometry Class of the Java Topology Suite (JTS). This 
area for each component part belonging to a corridor is 
automatically displayed in the corridor data model table. Also, 
the coordinates of the centre point of the nominated area are 
displayed in the table (See Figure 3). These coordinates are 
calculated using the getCentroid function of the Geometry Class 
of the JTS. 
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Figure 4: Example of Component Part O Silk Roads CHRIS. 
Raster data in the Silk Roads CHRIS: To support the 
nomination and to more accurately locate boundaries and buffer 
zones as recommended by UNESCO (2010; 2011), other maps 
and more detailed background information such as satellite 
images were implemented in the GeoCMS (See Figure 5). The 
background data is composed of the Aster GDEM (METI and 
NASA) showing the elevations of the area of interest, the 
Aquastat (Hoogeveen) and RWD2 database (Dooley) 
containing the rivers, the Vmap0 data (NIMA) from which the 
lakes and administrative borders are used, as well as the 
database of the ICOMOS Silk Roads Thematic Study (Williams 
& Wordsworth 2010) from which e.g. the current important 
cities and the network of routes were derived, and high 
resolution satellite imagery of Digital Globe (2012), provided 
by Google maps. 
Raster data, such as scanned topographical maps and Landsat 
imagery, was also added to the GeoCMS. Raster data is first 
georeferenced by converting the row/column locations to their 
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