Safeguarding and exploiting Cultural Heritage induce the production of numerous and heterogeneous data. The management of these data is an essential task for the use and the diffusion of the information gathered on the field. Previously, the data handling was a hand-made task done thanks to efficient and experienced methods. Until the growth of computer science, other methods have been carried out for the digital preservation and treatment of Cultural Heritage information. The development of computerized data management systems to store and make use of archaeological datasets is then a significant task nowadays. Especially for sites that have been excavated and worked without computerized means, it is now necessary to put all the data produced onto computer. This allows preservation of the information digitally (in addition with the paper documents) and offers new exploitation possibilities, like the immediate connection of different kinds of data for analyses, or the digital documentation of the site for its improvement. Geographical Information Systems have proved their potentialities in this scope, but they are not always adapted to the management of features at the scale of a particular archaeological site. Therefore this paper aims to present the development of a Virtual Research Environment dedicated to the exploitation of intra-site Cultural Heritage data. The Information System produced is based on open-source software modules dedicated to the Internet, so users can avoid being software driven and can register and consult data from different computers. The system gives the opportunity to do exploratory analyses of the data, especially at spatial and temporal levels. The system is compliant to every kind of Cultural Heritage site and allows management of diverse types of data. Some experimentation has been done on sites managed by the Service of the National Sites and Monuments of Luxembourg.

This paper examines 3D modelling of architectural elements with the help of parametric components. Such components may be useful within the framework of projects dealing with virtual 3D reconstruction of heritage monuments. Architectural components of the built heritage often have complex geometry. We studied the various geometrical shapes of a given architectural element, representative of a specific period and place. This study allowed us to identify the parameters and to implement parametric objects (in Maya Environment [1]). We also developed a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to answer the user's needs while generating the 3D model representing the architectural element. Within this GUI, the user is able to make adjustments with the help of laser point clouds from laserscanning, 2D plans or photographs. We exemplify our method with a case study dealing with openings and lintels. The corpus under study consists of elements of the built heritage of Montreal (Canada) and Nancy (France).

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