Article Excerpt:
"Site managers, archaeologists, and conservators rely on laser scanning to monitor sites, perform restoration work, and ensure the physical integrity of cultural heritage projects.
Cultural Heritage can be defined as monuments, buildings, or landscapes of "outstanding universal val-ue from the point of view of history, art or science." These sites are often under threat from environmental conditions, structural instability, increased tour-ism and development, and they are most likely under-funded, and hence, inadequately documented and maintained. Laser scanning, in combination with other digital documentation tech-niques and traditional survey, provides an extremely useful way to document the spatial characteristics of these sites. This spatial information forms not only an accurate record of these rapidly deteriorating sites, which can be saved for posterity, but also provides a comprehensive base data—set by which site managers, archaeologists, and conservators can monitor sites and perform necessary re-storation work to ensure their phys-ical integrity."
To read more of the Professional Surveyor article "Laser Scanning for Cultural Heritage Applications," follow the link to the article on the Professional Surveyor website. To learn more about Cyark and the digital archive of cultural heritage sites that it is creating, follow the second link to the Cyark web portal.
