2011 - Geoinformatics

sition & Processing
housing the royal trains at the National Railway Museum. In total,
the conference had a busy and satisfying programme of activities.
Keynote Addresses
The first of the three keynote addresses was given by Professor
Jon Mills of Newcastle University, who is the president of ISPRS
Commission V. He first reviewed the past and present activities of
the Commission, before going on to outline the extensive international
cooperation that is taking place in the acquisition and processing
of cultural heritage data. The second address, entitled “An
Update on the Scottish Ten” was given by Doug Pritchard, who
is the Head of Visualisation at the Digital Design Studio of Glasgow
School of Art and Director of the Centre for Digital Documentation
& Visualization (CDDV). The Centre is a collaborative venture
between the School of Art and Historic Scotland, which is the agency
of the Scottish Government charged with safeguarding the country’s
historic environment. One of its major projects is the so-called
“Scottish Ten” which aims to deliver the comprehensive digital documentation
of the five UNESCO World Heritage Sites located in
Scotland and a further five International Heritage Sites. Using a combination
of airborne and terrestrial laser scanning and imaging,
three of the Scottish sites - (i) the New Lanark industrial settlement
and village dating from the late 18 th Century; (ii) the group of
Neolithic sites in the northern island of Orkney; and (iii) the remote
and now-deserted Atlantic island of St. Kilda – have already been
surveyed. The survey of a fourth large site – the old town of
Fig. 3 – Stonehenge – showing its circles of large standing stones. (Source: Gareth Wiscombe on Wikipedia)
E v e n t
Edinburgh – is currently under way. On the international front, in
cooperation with the U.S. National Park Service, the CyArk organisation
and local specialists, the Scottish team has already carried
out the survey of the spectacular national memorial of four former
American presidents that has been carved out on the side of Mount
Rushmore in South Dakota in the U.S.A. The images that have been
acquired by the team using Leica ScanStation scanners that were
shown during this address were really outstanding [Figs. 1 and 2].
Currently the planning of the survey of the Rani Ki Vav (The Queen's
Stepwell) site in Gujerat, India dating from the 11th Century is well
under way and will take place soon. Once this has been completed,
the next international site that will be surveyed (in 2012) will be
the Eastern Qing Tombs, located northeast of Beijing, where numerous
Chinese emperors and empresses are buried.
The third keynote address was given by Paul Backhouse, who is
the head of Imaging Graphics & Survey of English Heritage, which
is the official agency that is charged with the preservation and management
of the historic built environment of England. He gave an
account of the strategies and the technologies that have been adopted
by his agency in acquiring measured data of a large number of
heritage sites in England and the lessons that have been learned
from these surveys. Details were given of four case studies – (i)
Coombe Down, a huge underground stone mine located near the
city of Bath in south-west England; (ii) Chedham’s Yard, an old blacksmith’s
workshop located in Warwickshire; (iii) the Dover Tunnels,
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