A GIS-Based Cultural Heritage Study Framework on Continuous Scales: A Case Study on 19th Century Military Industrial Heritage

Abstract

This paper presents a framework of introducing GIS technology to record and analyse cultural heritages in continuous spatial scales. The research team is developing a systematic approach to support heritage conservation research and practice on historical buildings, courtyards, historical towns, and archaeological sites ad landscapes. These studies are conducted not only from the property or site scales, but also investigated from their contexts in setting as well as regional scales. From these continues scales, authenticity and integrity of a heritage can be interpreted from a broader spatial and temporal context, in which GIS would contribute through database, spatial analysis, and visualization. The case study is the construction of a information indexing framework of Dagu Dock industrial heritage to integrate physical buildings, courtyards, natural settings as well as their intangible characteristics which are affiliated to the physical heritage properties and presented through historical, social and culture semantics. The paper illustrates methodology and content of recording physical and social/cultural semantics of culture heritages on different scales as well as connection between different levels of database.