Smart City Technologies for Cultural Heritage Protection

Climate change (CC) will morph the environmental landscape, thus leading to climate stress imposed on Cultural Heritage (CH). Especially, tangible CH, like castles, palaces, monuments and churches as well as gardens are exposed to CH effects. Such effects are heat waves, flooding, higher sea level, just to name a few.

The management and preservation of such CH buildings and whole sites, particularly in the context of CC, is a complex task in which authorities and decision makers need to aggregate and oversee information from diverse sources and domains. Yet, only by considering all relevant and available information, stakeholders can make well-grounded decisions. This imposes a complex task upon the authorities, not only due to the diversity and heterogeneity, but also to the quantity of available data.
Only if the current and future situation of the CH in focus is understood, strategies for protecting them can be developed.

The first challenge is to apply different kind of sensors to the buildings and gardens to collect data about the weather (temperature, precipitation, etc.), the situation of walls incl. cracks and the state of plants. After that, this data needs to be managed and made accessible in homogeneous way for further processing and analysis.
The domain of smart city research faces the exact same problems. Sensors are applied all over the city for example about traffic, infrastructure, air and water quality and weather data. In contrast to CH the community is much larger and the industry is involved as well.

Therefore, it is beneficial to look into technologies developed for smart cities and analyze how they can be applied to the monitoring of CH sites. For retrieving, managing and processing sensor data there are open standards evolving, for example the SensorThings API standard by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Currently, many tools evolve around such standards from which some are available as open source.
First results of successfully applying these technologies from different CH and smart city projects will be presented.