Vra Core 4.0 Metadata Standard for the Facades of the Historic Houses of Athens (19^th – Early 20^th Century)

Abstract

The development of technology and the continuous production of information through research in culture have created the need to store a large amount of new and existing digital data. The digital storage of information relating to cultural heritage is possible with the use of structured databases, with related information for their safe preservation over time and the easiest access to them. This paper presents a research project on the collection of information about the characteristics of the facades of the Athenian houses from the 19th until the beginning of the 20th century. The information was divided into three periods for their classification, the Neoclassical period (19th – early 20th century), the Eclectic period (mid-19th century – early 20th century), and the Interwar period (early 20th century – 1940). The metadata standards were created to manage and exchange cultural information using the library of Congress in the US and the XML markup global language that is readable both by humans and computers. Moreover, the hierarchical classification of information enables architectural features to be used also in other platforms e.g. such as HBIM (Historic Building Information Modeling), GIS, or three-dimensional models etc. During the research of the external characteristics of the Athenian houses from the 19th to early 20th century, the existing databases on Internet, for the buildings that are dated on the period which is being considered (19th – early 20th century), were examined. Nevertheless, each of them had different characteristics e.g. the information was organized either on a map using pins or in images, based on chronology, accompanied by texts in the Greek language. As a solution to the aforementioned problem, the present work, which was a master’s thesis in the framework of the “Digital Culture” program of the University of Piraeus, aims to identify the main architectural characteristics of each period and create metadata in the English language so that they can be interoperable and used with other related vocabularies.