The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. Vol. XXXVII. Part B5. Beijing 2008
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Figure 3. the flow chart for application of SIT
in cultural heritage conservation
3. MAIN RESULTS FROM ESTABLISED STUDIES
3.1 Standards for applying SIT to cultural heritage
conservation
Types of cultural resource along GCC are so diversiform that
almost all known types of cultural heritages in other places of
China could be found there, they may be hydraulic facility,
historical architecture, statue, mausoleum, and so on. It appears
necessary to set some standards to guide the attempt of get the
information from remote sensing imagery, surveying results of
GPS, and make sure the field investigations data, which holds
the form of tables, graphics and archaeological reports, could be
imported to the data base correctly. A series of standards are
designed by experts of information technology, together with
researchers of cultural resource conservation and professionals
from field archaeology, including regulations of dada collecting
with a custom PDA, standards for classifying and coding of
cultural resources, rules for data types and data structures in
spatial data base.
3.2 Information Systems for GCC conservation
On the basis of studies on key technologies, four information
systems have been developed to support the conservation of
GCC, including GIS system of GCC, 3D landscape simulation
system, conservation planning supporting system, and data
collecting system for field investigation based on customized
PDA with GPS module. The first two systems are discussed
particularly as follows.
3.2.1 GIS for GCC: A GIS system with two versions is
developed for GCC conservation, which could be managed on
desktop or visited via Internet
(http://geospatial.arch.tsinghua.edu.cn ) respectively, including
spatial database, fundamental module as functions of general
GIS system, and extended module for professional user(Figure
5).
Implementing with the tools of ArcSDE and Oracle lOg, the
spatial data is organized into three levels with different scales
(macro, meso and micro). At the macro-level, ETM (14 scenes)
is used, together with the DLG at the scale of 1:250,000(14
pages). At the meso-level, there are SPOT 5 (42 scenes) and
DLG with the scale of 1:50,000 (105 pages). All the spatial data
at the above two levels respectively covers the extension of the
canal. At the micro-level, QuickBird imagery is used for seven
important historical sites or cities along the canal, Beijing (214
km 2 ), Tianjin (836 km 2 ), Cangzhou (410 km 2 ), Jining (215 km 2 ),
Liaocheng (315km 2 ), Pizhou (925km 2 ), Hangzhou (321 km 2 ),
together with DLGs at the scale of 1:10,000(392 pages) which
also cover the canal with a given buffer. Except for data at the
three levels, there are many precious old panchromatic air photo
taken by American air force during the period of World War 2.
Facing the huge amount of images and datasets, some methods
are employed to improve the efficiency of the spatial data base
(Shekhar et al., 2003.).
Figure 4. The GIS system for GCC conservation
The GIS system has shown its value in an archaeological
extraction approved by government, at Nanwang, Shandong
province. With the help of local archaeologists, we utilize the
satellite imagery to detect disappearing channels. Moreover the
GIS system is used to manage the documents and surveying
datasets, visualize the extraction site, and predict potential
archaeological site locations.
3.2.2 3D Simulation System of GCC
A 3D simulation system is build to modelling the landscape
along GCC, using the data of DEM and SPOT 5, following the
methods we have introduced for simulating Jinjiang Basin with
special corrections (Huang et al., 2006; Pollefeys et al., 2000).
Regarding to the massive data of this project, Oracle 10g is
chosen to manage the spatial data and feature attribute, instead
of the Microsoft Access. There are two attractive characters of
this system. The first one is the multi-scale simulation and
