Cultural heritage

Preserved heritage has become an anchor of the global tourism industry, a major contributor of economic value to local communities.

These include social values and traditions, customs and practices, aesthetic and spiritual beliefs, artistic expression, language and other aspects of human activity.

The significance of physical artifacts can be interpreted as an act against the backdrop of socioeconomic, political, ethnic, religious, and philosophical values of a particular group of people.

These kinds of heritage sites often serve as an important component in a country's tourist industry, attracting many visitors from abroad as well as locally.

The roots of today's legal situation for the precise protection of cultural heritage also lie in some of the regulations of Austria's ruler Maria Theresa (1717 - 1780) and the demands of the Congress of Vienna (1814/15) not to remove works of art from their place of origin in the war.

[12] The process continued at the end of the 19th century when, in 1874 (in Brussels), at least a draft international agreement on the laws and customs of war was agreed.

25 years later, in 1899, an international peace conference was held in the Netherlands on the initiative of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, with the aim of revising the declaration (which was never ratified) and adopting a convention.

While digital acquisition techniques can provide a technological solution that is able to acquire the shape and the appearance of artifacts with unprecedented precision[24] in human history, the actuality of the object, as opposed to a reproduction, draws people in and gives them a literal way of touching the past.

This poses a danger as places and things are damaged by the hands of tourists, the light required to display them, and other risks of making an object known and available.

The reality of this risk reinforces the fact that all artifacts are in a constant state of chemical transformation so that what is considered to be preserved is actually changing – it is never as it once was.

Its central idea was that social institutions, scientific knowledge, and technological applications need to use a "heritage" as a "resource".

Key international documents and bodies include: The U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report describing some of the United States' cultural property protection efforts.

Also, there have been tragic occurrences of unexpected human-made disasters, such as in the cases of a fire that took place in the 200 years old National Museum of Brazil and the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

Therefore, there is a growing need to digitize cultural heritage in order to preserve them in the face of potential calamities such as climate change, natural disaster, poor policy or inadequate infrastructure.

The high cost and relative complexity of 3D scanning technologies have made it quite impractical for many heritage institutions in the past, but this is changing, as technology advances and its relative costs are decreasing to reach a level where even mobile based scanning applications can be used to create a virtual museum.