Managing cultural heritage. Digital documentation and archiving

Presented in the study is an analysis of methodologies for digital representing, documenting and popularizing cultural heritage through digital archives. The development and perfecting of techniques for acquiring and elaborating photorealistic 3D models, made them pivotal elements for popularizing information of objects on the scale of architectonic structures. The experiment conducted on the Gates of Bologna aims at presenting the continuity of work starting with the acquisition and elaboration of 3D models created with the help of expeditious methodologies, then comparing various systems to finally achieve a systematization of heterogeneous data within a digital platform, bringing out its potentialities and limits. The objective is to present the way in which digital technologies allow us to document, preserve, evaluate and popularize cultural heritage by structuring out an “open” system of cognition and therefore always lending itself to implementation.