On Saturday 28th February, ARTEMIS held a two-hour workshop in the morning at the TOURISMA exhibition in Florence, Italy which was open to the public. The purpose of this event, which was held in Italian, was to explain to the attendees what Reactive Heritage Digital Twins (RHDTs) are and how ARTEMIS is working with these for the benefit of Cultural Heritage.
The workshop started with a welcome and introduction to the project by Franco Niccolucci (PIN), the ARTEMIS Technical Director, followed by a presentation from Vicky Dritsou (ATHENA-RC) about the ontology created for the construction of a digital twin. She used the Temple of Athena as an example which has accumulated documentation which may include images and 3D models and also measurement data, as well as information about interventions made to its structure over time. Today, it is possible to monitor and assess the temple in real time, react to the risks and to anticipate threats from climate change and pollution, for example. All this information must be collected and transformed into a common language that maps the relationships to the data so that the resulting graph (knowledge base) can be interrogated and used to make decisions and predict likely outcomes.
Miriana Somenzi and Aida Himmiche (ARIADNE RI) then explained the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it can be used to organise the many sources of information into a coherent knowledgebase. AI can perform tasks such as scanning texts and using character recognition, assign keywords to images and documents and enrich data and organise it, doing this very quickly once the models have been trained. Vision Language Models (VLMs) are used to create the ARTEMIS Knowledge base with the input from sector experts. Once the knowledge base has been constructed, AI can be used to interrogate it and answer research questions. Some concrete examples are the ability to reconstruct artefacts from separate pieces (see image right), connecting different excavated objects to the same site, identifying artefacts which have originated from the same workshop or material source and objects that have been created by the same artist. In addition, AI can be used to predict outcomes in scenarios such as how will a 10% increase in humidity affect a statue and other scenarios, enabling mitigation of risks and preventative actions to be taken.
Lucio Colizzi (Smarteducationlab) was next on the Agenda to talk about the services that ARTEMIS would provide which cover data processing, simulations and forecasts for heritage protection. The services can be combined to create complete Digital Twins and consist of:
- an API,
- Internet of Cultural Things (IoCT),
- Simulation and Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) services.
The service infrastructure connects with the data infrastructure (as described in the previous presentations) and is made available through the ARTEMIS Cloud where they will be demonstrated in the pilots. Lucio went into greater details about the different types of services and their functions and conclude with a example which described a series of services that would be used to detect a person who wanted to damage a cultural object and to set off an alarm.
The penultimate presentation by Anestis Koutsoudis (ATHENA-RC) was about the pilots that will be used to test and improve the services. Using the example of historic city centres which can suffer from over-crowding during organised events, he illustrated how RHDTs can be used to assess the risks to sensitive CH sites and safety of visitors. Integrated decision support combines spatial data, operational rules and local knowledge to test scenarios for outcomes that balance all these requirements. He then described a scenario based on the old town of Xanthi and outlined the objectives of this pilot which used a photogrammetry 3D replica of the historic centre to visualise the simulation results. This simulation was also available for visitors to try out at the ARTEMIS stand and proved to be very popular.
Testing the Xanthi 3D City Centre crowd modelling in the lab
Visitors trying out the Xanthi city centre simulation at the booth
The final presentation was given by Garcia Tucci and her colleague from UNIFI on the Digital Twin of the Pistoia pulpit by Giovanni Pisano in the church of Sant’Andrea. The European Commission has recommended that all cultural heritage at risk should have 3D models made by 2030, with at least 50% scanned of those sites and objects that are most frequently visited by this date. The Cultural Heritage Cloud will support a digital ecosystem to enable this objective along with the tools and services supplied by ARTEMIS. After describing the ontology in some detail, it was noted that the Pistoia pulpit lent itself well and relationships with other pulpits and carvings can be identified from the data. The many fine carvings and details of the pulpit are individually described along with information such as the relocation of the pulpit in 1619 due to the Counter-reformation when some of the parts were reassembled in a different order leading to some instability and the need for interventions. It is important that all this information is recorded to guide how future conservation actions are implemented.
The latest scans and photogrammetry have helped to improve the quality of the alignments of the pulpit parts. Over 6,500 images have been taken from 314 target points which has enabled the creation of a geometric model that can be used to analyse the physical structure of the pulpit and to correct the alignments. In addition, the models and analyses served as the starting point for defining the monitoring project. The installed system includes six linear distance meters and three accelerometers, along with an ambient temperature and humidity sensor and a piezometer for monitoring the groundwater level. This project is a fine example of a Reactive Heritage Digital Twin in action.
The workshop concluded with a discussion about the pulpit project and a round up from Franco Niccolucci on the future developments from ARTEMIS.
The pulpit by Giovanni Pisano in the church of Sant’Andrea, Pistoia, Tuscany.
Scanning the pulpit
