Central to the entire discipline of heritage restoration and conservation is the concept of information management. Nevertheless, traditionally, conservation and restoration has been a poorly documented discipline, which has led not only to a lack of standardization and awareness about the processes carried out in the past, but also poses problems both when new restoration works are necessary and for the preventive conservation of the elements of heritage. This study sets out to propose a conceptual framework to explore the relationship between conservation of heritage and information management on the basis of case studies; in particular: a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) of a regional government concerning an endangered plant (wild grapevine) with an important potential for cultural and touristic uses in a wine-making region; an open data guide—the Digital Guide of Andalusian Cultural Heritage; a university repository connected to Europeana, which contains reports and outcomes of projects of geometric documentation of elements of heritage; a repository of an organization in charge of the protection and care of the heritage; and finally, two examples of the use of heritage building information models (HBIM) in complex monuments. After discussing the characteristics of each case, this paper concludes that, although the availability of information and tools is growing, further progress is still necessary concerning the interoperability, outreach and reuse of the different solutions.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> During the last decade, we have witnessed an increased interest in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), including the so-called “Historical GIS”, 3D GIS heritage and its subcategory of “SDI for cultural heritage”. Specific literature reviews, gathering and analysing the scientific production for Culture Heritage and GIS based research questions, are currently lacking. Therefore, the overall goal of this article is to provide an objective summary of the current state-of-the-art concerning how GIS has been used and what methods and analysis have been applied in the field of cultural heritage. In this sense, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of the literature on the application of GIS in cultural heritage is carried out. To do so, the WOS and Scopus databases were considered. The results show that the dominant application of GIS is in the realisation of inventory and cataloguing of archaeological and architectural heritage. As a result of the quantitative analysis, we also verify the principal sources in which most studies have been published, highlighting the “ISPRS Archives” with 14 publications, the “Lecture Notes in Computer Science” with 9, and “Proceedings of Digital Heritage” with 6 publications. These data show that the sources that most publish mainly belong to the field of IT and Computer Science. In addition, the SLR shows that in the last three years there has been a greater tendency to use GIS to solve more specific problems of heritage through its use in conjunction with other tools such as BIM and photogrammetry.</p>

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The increase of multidisciplinary research in the field of architectural history has led to the need to set up new experiences and solutions for the handling and integration of the information extracted from historical documents. These solutions seek to support diverse users of the research community with the aim of solving challenges directly related with the digitalisation, structuring, standardisation, and management of historical information. These challenges include, for example, the creation of a digital support that enables a collaborative growth and management of information, the normalisation of terms and vocabularies to make its analysis efficient, the elaborating of a conceptual model, and the development of a metadata support that allows its more expanded dissemination and reuse. This article describes a case study project in which the documents of archives, of research, and of projects previously carried out by the Late Gothic Network (Red Tardogótica) are the raw material for the proposal of an event-oriented historical database (e-database). This e-database means to record and systematise the information about the artistic transfers related with the architectural production in the transition of the Modern Age, a period also known as the Late Gothic. The e-database's design has considered the possibility of its use for the analysis of social networks (abstract-relational model, a Graph model) and the spatiotemporal analysis of the events (geo-temporal model, GIS). The main section of this article describes the architecture of the database, with a view to addressing the questions of the relations between the datasets and the matter of implementing the thesauri and controlled vocabularies that must be respected for the standardisation, recording, and later analysis of the data. Next, we contribute quantitative and qualitative analyses to evaluate the database's important gaps of information. This proposal initially covers the geographical framework of the western Andalusian territory, but it can be expanded to other areas and adapted to other case studies. Finally, the article summarises the learning achieved in this first phase of the case study project and describes the perspectives to broaden its use in the community of architectural history researchers.