Cultural Heritage Management Tools: The Role of GIS and BIM

The use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) in the framework of cultural heritage management started very soon after the first practical applications of this technology for land planning and environmental monitoring. At the beginning, GIS was conceived as a repository of structured data coming from excavations and relict analysis, but soon the possibility to locate the different information in a common reference system, opened the floor to a deeper use of GIS technology. While GIS application in the framework of cultural heritage can be considered today as a logical and standard tool, the same cannot be applied to BIM. GIS is presented underlying the achieved standards in cultural heritage applications while BIM is introduced as an ‘in progress’ technology to be carefully investigated as a possible instrument to integrate and complete the potentiality of GIS.