Digital cultural heritage and its applications: Case studies of Digital Mogao Grottos and Chi Lin Nunnery reconstruction

摘要

Considerable damage has been done to the cultural heritage sites around the world ranging from natural erosion to artificial destruction. With the development of information sciences, frontier technologies are actively introduced to help protect cultural heritage sites. The new concept of a Digital Cultural Heritage has been presented for culture protection and is gradually becoming an efficient method to solve or to remit various difficult problems. This paper puts forward a digitalization method for cultural heritage sites which rationally integrates and utilizes multiform surveying measurements. These techniques have been successfully implemented into two projects, namely the Digital Mogao Grottos and the Chi Lin Nunnery reconstruction. Our results prove that the concept of and the techniques utilized in Digital Cultural Heritage can not only contribute to research, preservation, management, interpretation, and representation of cultural heritages but can also help resolve the conflicts between tourism and protection.