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A SPECIAL INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR THE DOCUMENTATION OF CASTLES 
Potsiou C., loannidis C., Badekas J. 
National Technical University of Athens, Greece 
ISPRS Commission V 
ABSTRACT: 
Castles are of great importance for Greece. Their sound documentation can only be achieved by combining 
properly photogrammetric methods to special Information Systems for the manipulation and storage of related 
alphanumeric,graphical digital and imagery data. By using the most affordable possible solution for hardware and 
software, an application for the documentation of a large Greek castle, named Acrocorinth, was tested. The 
information which was included into the system is given and the requirements in storage capacity for a variety 
of outputs are described. It can be concluded that such a system can be established with modest amount of funds, 
manpower and time and that the influence of it on the management of monuments will have a considerable 
effect. 
KEY WORDS: Archiving, Castle, Archaeological, G.I.S., Data Base, Documentation 
1. INTRODUCTION 
The Laboratory of Photogrammetry of NTU under the 
instruction of the Arcaeological Society of Athens is 
involved in a ten-year project of establishing a 
system for the documentation of Greek Castles mainly 
the Medieval,Venetian and Byzantine. 
This system will contain every information that could 
be collected from all existing sources for each 
Castle as well as new information, e.g. 
photogrammetric restitutions, mosaics, baloon 
photographs, new surveus, 3-D plans.The additional 
information will be produced mostly by the Lab. of 
Photogrammetry as well as other agencies. 
Although archaeological and architectural restitutions 
of monuments have undergone considerable 
developments and improvements over the years, they 
have generally been developed independently from 
each other isolated to a great extent from other 
activities related to each. 
Unfortunately, due to the lack of collaboration and 
interdisciplinary cooperation, the products of the 
various scientific approaches to a particular 
monument are usually scattered and extremely 
difficult to collect and use efficiently. Even more 
difficult is the collation and modification of the 
enormous amount of existing information arising from 
various sources for many practical reasons: eg. 
matters of scales, reference frames etc. Many 
countries and institutions have already tried to face 
up to the problem bu organising systematic archives 
related to monuments. 
The modern alternative answer is the creation of a 
Special Information System (S.1.5.). The structure of 
such a system would be complicated and very critical 
for its success. It could be established at a local 
level, especially in countries with many monuments, 
or at a district or national level. 
The proposal put forward by this paper is the 
establishment, in Greece, of a S.S. containing the 
documentation of Castles. This is of national 
importance for the simple reason that previous 
archaeological activities in Greece have, over the 
years, tended to focus on classical and pre-classical 
monuments and castles-usually medieval; Venetian 
and Byzantine taking a very second place. For this 
reason, the documentation on castles is extremely 
limited, but they can, on the other hand, unlike other 
antiquities, serve a positive modern purpose as 
tourism or recreation centres etc. Presently, 
conference centres, research facilities, even prisons 
are making full use of suitably adapted castles. 
The special I.S. of the Castles is PC oriented for 
practical reasons, with the possibility of free 
expansion of memory, H/W and S/W. The system used 
consists: 
- as far as hardware: a PC 386 (Compaq Deskpro 
386/25e) with 200 Mb hard disk,connected to a 
digitizer (Calcomp 9100) and a scanner (EPSON GT- 
6000) for the collection of information from 
existing maps or images, a Stereocord G2 and a 
VMAP-Digital Mapping System for photogrammetric 
restitutions; it is also connected to a printer and a 
plotter (Calcomp 1044) as output devices 
- as far as software: a PC ARC/INFO version 3.4, 
which is a general G.I.S. package, with DBASE IV for 
data base and AutoCAD for editing of analytical 
photogrammetric restitutions or other digitized 
data. 
2. INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THE S.S. 
The decision for the information which will be 
included and processed by the system is very 
important, because, to a great extend, will give the 
character and the efficiency of the system. The final 
answer on this question will be defined after long 
cooperation with all authorities who are expected to 
use the system. 
As a first approximation the following groups of 
recorded information are identified: 
1)General information 
location of the monument, administrative infor- 
mation, access possibilities, land use, ownership, 
meteorological data