Using a Cultural Heritage Information System for the documentation of the restoration process

Conventional information systems are frequently used to document Cultural Heritage sites. These systems are adequate for some specific purposes as they can store and retrieve a large amount of heterogeneous documents. Nevertheless, this is not enough for research and conservation purposes; researchers need to be able to find out relations between data. These relations are mostly spatial, and can be established by meaning of a 3D representation of the artifact. In order to achieve this, a new kind of information system is proposed, for which the 3D representation of the object is used as a blackboard, where all the data is represented. This paper describes the use of CHISel, a documentation tool that is designed as a GIS-like software for 3D cultural heritage, implementing the concept of a Cultural Heritage Information System (CHIS), and its application to document and analyze the restoration process of sculptures.