Data in the Heritage Domain: Digital Datasets, Twins for Cultural Heritage, and Applications

Dear Colleagues,

“Digital Twin” is a relatively recent notion that is now developing quickly in several applied research contexts, from engineering to architecture, aerospace, AI-inspired domains like IoT and robotics, manufacturing, healthcare, and so on. At its origin, a digital twin was supposed to represent strictly a high-fidelity, virtual/digital image of a real-world physical entity, but was then utilized to evaluate, simulate, optimize and predict behaviours and performances of the corresponding physical entity. This notion has been successively generalized to denote, more generally, a digital/formal/computer usable description of the symbolic/semantic aspects characterizing some particular categories of real-world entities. The BIM (Building Information Modelling) world has played a pioneering role in this context, through the introduction of “semantic digital twins” devoted to the digital representation of buildings and of the different construction phases involving walls, pillars, floors, ceilings, etc.

The interest in a possible use of digital twins, in their “semantic-based” versions in particular, has caught the attention of the Cultural Heritage community, which has started to reflect on the possibility of creating some sort of “Digital Cultural Heritage Twins”. The 2022 “Report on a European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage, ECCCH”—which represents the guiding light for carrying out this particularly ambitious ECCCH project—includes, e.g., multiple references to the necessity of implementing Digital Twins and Digital Twins Repositories in an ECCCH context. With respect, however, to the proposals about how to concretely implement this particular sort of Digital Twins, the options have diverged significantly. For example, ECCCH researchers have opted for representing the Cultural Digital Twins making use of an extension of the well-known CIDOC CRM “binary” ontology; others have objected that this solution could appear as too static and computationally complex, and that a sort of “n-ary solution” was preferable, and others have also suggested the implementation of compromise solutions in this context. In the Cultural Digital Twins domain, the general panorama is then particularly contrasted.

The aim of this Special Issue is then to provide a comprehensive overview of the last research developments and applications of the notion of the Cultural Heritage Twin, including a detailed analysis of the pros and cons of all the different solutions proposed, of their concrete implementation, and of their possible integration.

Dr. Gian Piero Zarri
Dr. Sorin Hermon
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Heritage is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• digitalisation procedures in the cultural heritage domain
• formal semantic representation, binary versus n-ary approaches
• cultural heritage digital twin
• digital representation of iconographic narratives