Alaric Projet

Many databases describe the city and its elements from different points of view, different dates and different objectives (construction permits for a building, urban planner’s reflection on the development of an urban area, architectural plans, …). However, browsing such data requires the use of universal identifiers to link each component to its equivalent in another database. Such identifiers remain rare and inaccessible while all these data are initially linked to the same element: the object of the city which they describe.

Thanks to the improvement of generating techniques of 3D models of the city, these are becoming more comprehensive, realistic and certainly more accessible. We therefore believe that they can be used to store these sets of documents by linking them to the urban objects represented in 3D. An identifier would thus no longer be the only way to select an element of the city and the different information related thereto. The user could move into the virtual city, click on the urban item that interests them and directly get the list of available documents.

This possibility was implemented for the Alaric project . A number of document corpus describing two centuries of urban transformation in the cities of Terrenoire and Givors were grouped and analysed. These documents were then bound to a mapping whose objective is to offer a 3D visualization of the evolution of these two areas over time, through the access to documents that allowed the interpretation and creation of this 3D city model.

Publications

Samuel, J., Périnaud, C., Servigne, S., Gay, G., & Gesquière, G. (2016, October). Representation and Visualization of Urban Fabric through Historical Documents. In 14th Eurographics Workshop on Graphics and Cultural Heritage (pp. 157-166).