Dr. Luciano Mule'Stagno

Malta's Monuments seen through digital eyes - Using digital media to conserve and interpret Malta's Megalithic Temples

The 5,000-year-old Megalithic Temples of Malta are one of the country's foremost cultural assets, inscribed on the World Heritage List, and managed by Heritage Malta.
Since 2005, a new generation of high-resolution base-line data on the monuments has been captured in the form of laser-scanned 3-D digital models, which have multiple applications in their conservation, management and presentation. The models form a key record for future conservation interventions, and are being developed into an easily navigable platform for the storage and rapid retrieval of archival records on every component of the monuments, including past interventions. The 3-D models are being converted to a browser format to be made available on the Heritage Malta national portal.
The MICHAEL European Portal will be populated by harvesting data from MICHAEL Plus local instances. Web-users visiting the MICHAEL European portal looking up, for instance, World Heritage Sites will find basic information on World Heritage Sites from partner countries, and links to the partners' respective portals. The Maltese instance is populated by data from Heritage Malta's existing museum data repositories, and by direct cataloguing. Artifact databases and conservation reports will also be accessible in a multilingual environment on the Heritage Malta portal and via MICHAEL.