Preserving Venice

The last project of the series this fall is the only one that doesn't focus on preserving Venetians, but concentrates instead on the preservation of Venice itself and of the inanimate objets d'art that decorate it. This project will continue what the PreserVenice team accomplished last year for public art and will expand the work to the rest of our heritage catalogs which also include palaces, convents, churches, bells, belltowers and church floors.
Over the summer, I've had some very interesting meetings with Dr. Engelbert Ruos, director of the UNESCO office in Venice, Dottoressa Clara Peranetti of the Cultural office of the Regional Government of the Veneto, and with Dr. Wolfgang Wolters, emeritus professor of Art History at the Technische Universität in Berlin. Each of these encounters promises to be useful for this project.
UNESCO
With Dr. Ruos and Dr. Philippe Pypaert, there are two areas of collaboration: (1) to organize our heritage datasets so they can be combined with other data in support of the world cafès that BRESCE wants to organize for 2009; (2) to design a system to manage the information about art and architecture restorations that are sponsored by the Private Committees under the coordination of UNESCO.
REGIONE
With Dr. Peranetti of the Regione Veneto, the plan is to identify a EU project or another funding source that will enable us to publish all the Pubic Art data at our disposal on the web, so that we can really jumpstart Preservenice in collaboration with the Giovani Veneziani.
WOLTERS
With Prof. Wolters, the main focus would be on Bells and Belltowers, on which we hope to collaborate, although it is unclear who, if anyone, may be able to sponsor that project.

This fall's WPI project team will help us make progress on all these fronts to the best of its ability.