Advanced Technologies in Digitizing Cultural Heritage Volume II

1. Introduction

The need to digitize cultural heritage is important and well documented [1], as events like the fire at Notre Dame de Paris in 2019 and the fire at the National Museum of Brazil in 2018 revealed, along with the need for remote access to cultural content during the COVID-19 pandemic. Past research focused on applying data curation and digitization methods that respect the FAIR principles, and at the same time demonstrated how digitization enhanced access to cultural content and easy exploration, as well as how cultural preservation can assist in preserving and safeguarding tangible and intangible cultural heritage [1]. The initial digitization efforts focused on digitizing both objects and monuments, often creating rich but difficult-to-navigate repositories. Due to the volume of digitized material, the public often cannot use these repositories to derive meaning, discover heritage elements, or form reflections. Recognizing this issue of the large amount of unusable digitized material, funding bodies such as the European Union, the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the USA, and the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) in China, have supported research efforts that go beyond digitization alone, focusing on the use of digital assets for the exploration, presentation, and preservation of millions of digital heritage assets.

Past efforts focused on digitization efforts for identifying the lost heritage of historic places [2], on improving the graphics for the representation of heritage [3], on the development of BIM-based architectural methodologies [4], and on the exploration of the potential of blockchain technology for decentralizing cultural heritage [5]. In addition, researchers have also worked on improving virtual reality tools and techniques, as well as technologies for holographic views [6]. The variety in the tools and methods used when heritage is digitized is also reflected in numerous works that wish to provide an overview of the field (e.g., [7,8,9]).

Moving forward from the previous Special Issue (Volume I) on Advanced Technologies in Digitizing Cultural Heritage (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci/special_issues/digitizing_cultural_heritage, accessed on 9 June 2025), the current volume collects the latest developments in the field two years later.

2. Current Trends

The present Special Issue on advanced technologies in digitizing cultural heritage received papers that focused on the safeguarding, interpretation, and presentation of cultural heritage across the world. The diversity of the contributions reflects the vast spectrum of digital technologies for cultural heritage and their challenges and opportunities in allowing people to effectively interact and engage with and reflect on our heritage and past.

Often, heritage technologies attempt to provide solutions to numerous threats that compromise the survival of heritage elements due to various factors, like natural disasters and climate changes. The work by Chalkidou et al. opens the discussion regarding the heritage of coastal Mediterranean areas and the serious threat of rising sea levels. The paper uses scenarios and projection methodologies applied on open access data to predict the future of coastal areas by 2050 and 2100. The scenarios consider elevation data from the Copernicus GLO-30 Digital Surface Model (DSM), data on vertical ground motion from the European Ground Motion Service (EGMS), and assess the potential risks to heritage in the specified regions. The importance of the study is twofold, since it raises awareness of future heritage challenges, but also because it can inform policy makers of the effective adaptation strategies for mitigating the consequences of rising sea levels.

Moving forward, the work of Oštir et al. shows the potential of digitization in preserving heritage. This work uses a 2D reconstruction of a Roman mosaic, showing the Abduction of Europa, together with 3D animation to revive a Roman villa from the 4th century AD. The process followed to digitally reconstruct the mosaic can be applied to other cases, providing a blueprint. The outcome of the digitized cultural content is making the specific mosaic, and archeological research in general, more accessible to the wider public, also showing its cultural and artistic importance. Thus, this study provides important insights into the conservation of cultural heritage.

Furthermore, digital tools can meticulously document and analyze preservation processes like architectural repair history. Records of architectural repair information for architectural heritage can provide valuable knowledge on the outcomes of methodologies used for the preservation and conservation of tangible heritage, like historical buildings. The study by Park et al. collected the scattered architectural repair history of the Great Hero Hall of Sudeoksa Temple in Yesan, South Korea, and linked the non-formal and unstructured repair information of the site to BIM. This knowledge is used to form new maintenance planning, ensuring the preservation of the monument.

The work of Wang et al. shifts the focus of the Special Issue to extracting meaning through semantic associations, which is a major challenge when dealing with vast digital cultural datasets. The use of AI can reveal connections between different aspects of cultural heritage. In particular, the paper focuses on matching Thangka images to relevant texts, overcoming challenges in cross-modal matching. Th novel approach allowed the researchers to significantly improve the extraction capability of semantic associations between Thangka images and texts and enhance the datasets with pairs of images and relevant texts. The method presented can assist in the preservation and meaning making of cultural heritage, especially since the authors provide detailed descriptions of the processes and experimental setups.

Along the same lines, the work of Li and Bikakis also focuses on meaning making and meaningful recommendations. The researchers identify the issue of exploiting existing cultural datasets and go beyond digitization to improve visitor experiences. The semantics-based recommendation system for cultural heritage collections was developed and evaluated using archival data from Japanese art books of the colonial period to reveal their functionality. This approach can be used with different cultural datasets and is easily transferable to other heritage collections, showing the importance of semantic annotations in cultural heritage data for effective recommendations.

Digitization processes and methodologies that allow meaning making are crucial for the preservation of the culture of specific communities. For example, in recent years, the heritage of the Misak people in Colombia has been threatened due to globalization, but also due to high demands of Guadua angustifolia bamboo. Current approaches like the ones described by Segeur-Villanueva et al. allow for understanding local practices, which significantly improves the durability of the plants and increases the sustainability of the community through sustainable building with Guadua. The research also focuses on the importance of local heritage for sustainable design and construction and promotes the use of parametric design as a tool for integrating cultural heritage values. The design principles followed result in multiple possible solutions that can be adjusted to address the community’s needs.

Finally, the current Special Issue explores the potential of immersive cultural experiences. The work by Bolognesi et al. attempts to explore the bridge between the physical and digital worlds. The authors use the Mixed Reality continuum to discuss the merging of the physical and the digital and provide a complete workflow for the design and implementation of Mixed Reality experiences and, in particular, Augmented Reality ones. Historical stereographic images are presented with Augmented Reality, allowing users to compare historical and contemporary viewpoints. This comparison further allows users to understand the 3D dimensional and spatial contexts of cultural sites. Such approaches that connect the physical with the digital can be used both in cultural heritage and education, changing the way we think about heritage, but also the way we learn. The connections between the physical and the digital are also explored in the study by Korniejenko and Kontny, which focuses on Virtual and Augmented Reality for underwater archeology. These technologies can assist archeologists with preservation processes, since they can support analyses of archeological data and image processing. In addition, Virtual and Augmented Reality can also make underwater heritage accessible to the public and allow engagement with material hidden at the bottom of the sea.

3. Conclusions

The current Special Issue presents cutting-edge approaches in the digitization of cultural heritage. The published works demonstrate the profound impact of digital technologies in the heritage field. Furthermore, the approaches highlight a wide range of applications, methods, tools, and domains, addressing diverse needs. Technology has now reached a level of maturity that allows us to go beyond simple digitization and the creation of digital archives. These digital assets can now be leveraged to foster deeper public engagement, cultural reflection, and meaning making. They also support professionals in discovering new data associations and implementing innovative preservation methods. Understanding the past can also help contemporary society to enhance the sustainability of goods production—such as farming, housing, and more—by offering insights and solutions to today’s environmental and societal challenges.