Bologna porticoes project: A 3D repository for WHL UNESCO nomination

The system of Bologna porticoes, included in 2006 in the Italian tentative list of World heritage sites of UNESCO, will undergo a definitive recognition of the nomination as part of the program of the current municipal council. The nomination is aimed at highlighting the portico, not only as a high-quality architectural work, which in the past centuries has become a distinctive feature of the town, but also in its social, community and anthropological meanings, as a meeting place, a protected space. The nomination project refers to different subjects and is divided into many levels of action. Among them we are going to develop a platform conceived for on-line accessing the wealth of data and resources related to the Bolognese porticoes system, such as historical, artistic, architectural resources, besides all those data regarding its actual management. The platform will perform the harvesting of several already existing databases, making the data available to citizens, tourists and scholars thanks to a graphic interface allowing a navigation in space and time. Therefore our system will facilitate the development of further cultural and promotional cross-medial applications, such as apps for mobile devices, augmented graphics and 3D architectural mapping events. Through social media tools, citizens will be invited not only to enjoy and share the proposed contents, but also to take an active stance in the project by uploading contents and comments. The core of our platform will consist of reality-based high quality 3D models usable and navigable within the system as main user interface. Uniform quality and consistency of our reality-based 3D digital models along the more than 40 km of porticoes was ensured by a controlled, low-cost process starting from photo-modeling techniques.