Sunday, August 23, 2009

Public Earth (B09)

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.
The main goal of this project is to release all of our public art data to the web (following the model of Public Earth), after having organized, integrated and validated every VPC dataset, starting with the main Erratic Sculpture information, but making sure to include the long-neglected Belltowers, Bells and Church Floors.
The team will work with Public Earth to upload as much information as suitable for that site, but will primarily expand the current PreserVenice site with the intention of moving the maintenance of the information to crowdsourcing and with the goal of actually inaugurating the non-profit organization to begin collecting funds for the restoration and maintenance of the public collections of art in Venice and its lagoon. In this context, the team will interact with MIT Ph.D. candidate Laurie Zapalac who intends to study PreserVenice for her doctoral research at MIT.
The team will collaborate with the Regional Government of the Veneto to package the information for their archives as well.
The team will also experiment with the creation of an "ancient GIS" map based on the DeBarbari birdseye view of the city in the year 1500.

1 comment:

Kyle Miller said...

Definitely worthwhile to review the status of public art datasets (MapInfo layers), because there have been so many copies made over the years, it's not exactly clear where the most recent versions are. Once it gets to Public Earth, I'm assuming it can be held there and modified in their system, rather than requiring us to maintain our own versions any longer. This is a major step in starting to share our data! I would, however, think that Public Earth probably doesn't care much about the bells or belltowers, but rather only about the erratic sculpture, wellheads, fountains, etc., so I'd make it clear there are two objectives - validation and Public Earth, not necessarily exclusive, but separate.