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Visualisation & Animation of Cultural Heritage
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Session 6: Recording and Documentation
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The Establishing of historical monuments Database in the Czech Republic
Ales Cepek,
Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Civil Engineering, dept. Mapping
and Cartography, Thákurova 7, 166 09, Prague 6, Czech Republic, Head of Computer
Processing,
Tel.: +42024353881, Fax:+42024310774,
E-mail: cepek@fsv.cvut.cz
Karel Pavelka,
Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Civil Engineering, dept. Mapping and
Cartography, Thákurova 7, 166 09, Prague 6, Czech Republic, Head of Laboratory of Photogrammetry,
Tel.:+42024354951, Fax:+42024310774
E-mail: pavelka@fsv.cvut.cz
Abstract
Long term project of Czech historical monuments documentation has been started at the department of Mapping and Cartography, CTU Prague. The most important part of the project will be the database of photogrammetric images, mostly created in compliance with recommendation of CIPA web page (Waldhäusl, Ogleby). The results of the CTU Photogrammetric Laboratory projects (cooperated with the State Institute of Care of Historic Monuments and with the Laboratory of Quantitative Methods of Monuments Research, Faculty of Nuclear Physical and Physical Engineering) from last 5 years will be included into newly established database as a first step. Generally, the data being compiled in this project are of heterogeneous nature (images, texts, coordinates, plans etc.) and it is difficult to foreseen all possible future needs. For description of compiled data we are going to use Extended Mark-up Language (XML) which we suppose to be the best tool available for description of structured data independently on the software being currently used. Web presentation and searchable database of the project data will be derived from the XML documents.
XML Language
The database of the historical monuments of the Czech Republic will be composed of digital photogrammetric pictures together with other information mainly of the textual nature. We expect that each historical monument will be treated as an independent project and that all information collected is going to be available on the web. This middle term project is going to be maintained during several years. Because we have not had practical experience with such a kind of project, we decided to describe the data using XML language (Extensible Markup Language). We believe XML to be the best and the most flexible tool for the task we are heading for. XML is one of the markup languages designed for communication and description of data and generally it is supposed to be the fundamental language in data communication in the Internet in coming future. The XML language is closely related to the HTML, which started new revolutionary chapter in the development of the Internet. Both languages are derived from a more general language for data description SGML (Standard Generalised Markup Language). As is generally well known, HTML markup language defines mainly contents and structure of web pages and only in a lesser degree how the document will look. During the process of its development new tags have been added to the HTML versions to fulfil the growing needs and demands of its users. This resulted in a series of HTML versions and compatibility problems arising mainly from the usage of non-standard proprietary constructions. The HTML is a language with a given set of tags. XML language on the other hand defines clear and relatively simple syntax (XML is a subset of SGML) and user defines his own tags and rules for their usage. Because of relation of both languages, the conversion from XML into HTML is relatively simple and various conversion tools are available. Diversity of various HTML versions should be replaced in future by the XHTML language, which can be roughly characterised as an HTML with XML syntax. In our project we will have the possibility to offer users searching in the database of historical monument. Apart from others, the orientation on XML enables us to postpone the choice of concrete database system into future. Inputs into database are going to be generated from primary XML data. Technically speaking we can suppose each project (the information about an historical monument) to be stored in one directory on the disk in which digital photogrammetric images are going to be stored. Each directory will contain one XML project file describing all information about the given project. Let us suppose that the name of this file is project.xml. As we have mentioned earlier, it is typical for the XML that users define their own tags. In our case the root element might be <project>. Thus the project.xml file would contain the basic construction:
<project title="St. Vitus Cathedral">
<!-- all data describing project comes here -->
</project>
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