Ronald Wiemer / Hans de Haan
(Dutch National Service for the Archaeological Heritage, Amersfoort, The Netherlands)
Since 1999 it is governmental policy to stimulate planners and developers to use elements of cultural history in spatial planning. The idea behind this policy is that historic remains should play an important role in creating spatial quality, spatial meaning and historical links. In the Netherlands this is expressed by a slogan: “preservation through development”. To implement this policy in planning processes a stimulation programme has been set up that finances initiatives that promote the usage of cultural history in development schemes. Until now about 100 projects have been executed.
Nevertheless it is still not common practice to take existing cultural historic remains into account in spatial planning. One of the reasons behind this is the lack of awareness of the richness off the cultural landscape. The knowledge of the history of the landscape is not within direct reach of the policymakers, planners and developers that reshape the environment. To promote the usage of this knowledge we will have to make it more accessible e.g. bring it to the desk of the planner.
The “Knowledge Infrastructure for the Cultural Heritage” (KICH) has this as its main goal. To reach this goal a number of projects have been defined that generate the necessary tools. Among these tools are an information model for the domain of cultural heritage, a webportal that presents a nationwide (GIS-driven) overview of historic buildings, archaeology an landscape elements and a thesaurus to facilitate searching in these sources.
The information model is innovative in the sense that it is both applicable to geo-information and documentary information sources. As such it bridges the gap between the two. It complies with the standards for spatial planning and Dublin Core. In the further development Cidoc-CRM will be incorporated.
In our contribution we will focus on the current development stage of the information model and we will present the website in which the model is implemented.