The Arches Heritage Data Management Platform

Good afternoon, everybody.

I think we're going to

move ahead in the interest

of keeping this program on time.

My name is Anne Gilliland.

I am a professor of archival studies at UCLA.

My own research

looks at the role of archives

and memory in regions that are undergoing

or have undergone inter-ethnic conflict.

And I have worked in the countries

that emerged out of former

Yugoslavia for about two decades

at this point.

And actually by background,

I come from Northern Ireland.

We've already heard this morning

quite a bit about digital interventions

to help address the kinds of ongoing wars

that occur on sites of memory

and sites of heritage.

And I am delighted to introduce

our next speaker now, David Myers,

who is Senior Project Specialist

at the Getty Conservation Institute,

which is one of the major units

here at the Getty Center.

And he manages the Getty's

Recording and Documentation Unit.

And he's going to talk to us today about free

open source software that has

been developed here at the Getty.

It's actually been used to document

built heritage here in Los Angeles,

but it's been used in several places

around the globe now.

And it is called the Arches Heritage

Data Management Platform.

So thank you, David.

Thank you for that.

And good afternoon, everyone.

And I'd like to thank the UCLA Center

for European and Russian Studies

for organizing this event, which

is... We're seeing once again

that issues around cultural heritage

and armed conflict are urgent,

as they have been many times in the past.

And of course, Ukraine is not

the only place in the world

where these issues are urgent.

There's also Yemen, and Syria,

and Ethiopia and others.

I'm going to be presenting to you

briefly the, as mentioned, the open

source, our Arches Heritage

Data Management Platform, which

has been developed by my institution,

the Getty Conservation Institute.

And also I'm going to

be speaking to why having

systems like this is so important

to informed heritage management,

and especially in armed conflict

situations like we've been looking at.

As mentioned, the GCI, the Getty

Conservation Institute, where I work,

is one of the four programs of the

J. Paul Getty Trust.

And the other is the Getty Museum,

the Getty Research Institute,

and the Getty Foundation.

And we're headquartered

here at the Getty Center,

but as some of you know,

there's also the Getty Villa

near Malibu.

And as some of you might know,

last month the Getty,

through the Getty Foundation,

entered into a partnership

with the ALIPH Foundation, which

has been mentioned before here,

to provide $1,000,000

to support cultural heritage protection

in Ukraine.

So the mission of the GCI, where I work,

is focused on advancing

heritage conservation practice

internationally relating to

visual arts, broadly interpreted.

So that includes objects,

collections, architecture and sites.

We aim to serve the conservation community

internationally through scientific

research, education and training and also

model field projects.

And in all of our work,

we try to address

pressing needs of the international

heritage conservation community,

also to leverage resources

through partnerships,

and to build capacity to try to

help ensure

sustainability of impacts.

So here you can see a bit of our work

relating to buildings and sites,

and science. We have

scientific laboratories

in another building here at the GCI

and work relating

to collections, and collection environments.

And really in all of our work,

we try to disseminate

information for the conservation

community internationally about,

you know, our work, but also

different important topics

related to heritage conservation.

So back to Arches.

I thought it was important to point out

that the origins of the Arches project

really stretch back to 2003-2004

when with the invasion of Iraq

and, as many of you know,

that country has a very rich heritage

and there were lots of

negative impacts to that heritage.

And here you can see

looting of archeological sites,

which is widespread. And

you can also see that here.

But there were also

impacts on the ground

from military operations.

And this is one example

showing the ancient city of Samarra

and the blue line is a defensive

berm that was constructed,

but it happened to go

right through, in orange,

you see archeological remains

that that berm was constructed through,

So it is really important

to have information

about important cultural heritage

where it is and so on

before, during, and after

conflicts such as this.

So in response to the

situation in Iraq,

the GCI and World Monuments

Fund partnered in 2004

to create the Iraq Cultural Heritage

Conservation Initiative and

our main aim was to help support

the national heritage authority

in Iraq and its capacity.

And it had been isolated for quite

some time from the international field.

And one component of that work

was to create a national digital inventory

of immovable heritage, which was

desperately, needed there.

Unfortunately, due to the political

and security situation

there, that work was difficult

to move forward.

So instead of just putting

that effort on hold,

what we decided to do was

shift our efforts to Jordan,

which is the country

neighboring Iraq to the west.

And we worked with the Department

of Antiquities there to develop

a national heritage

or archeological inventory

system called MEGA Jordan,

the Middle Eastern Geodatabase

for Antiquities for Jordan.

And our plan was to develop it

there where we had access.

And then, when the situation

allowed, we would then

use that software development

to implement in Iraq.

So since 2011, MEGA Jordan

has been the national

archeological documentation

system for Jordan.

And you can find it online.

Unfortunately, conditions didn't

allow the plan for Iraq to move forward.

But what we learned

through all that experience is

as we've been hearing about

today, just how important

having this kind of information is to be able

to manage heritage in an informed way.

And having up to date

cultural heritage inventory.

And that can take you

from kind of a blank slate,

like you see here,

to having information

identifying all of

your important heritage places

within your jurisdiction.

So you can take them into

account for all kinds of uses.

And really what's needed

is detailed information

on each heritage resource,

not only describing its location, but

significance and many other attributes.

And really the more detail you can have

and the more up to date

you can have that information,

you're in a better position

to then protect that heritage

or at least take it into account.

So that let us, well,

before I get to that.

The different kinds of uses

for systems like this,

the most common is just

day to day development.

When ideally you can take

into account significant cultural heritage,

but also being prepared for natural disasters.

And here you see, this was Hurricane

Katrina, and this was

New Orleans after the hurricane,

which is a historic city.

So being able to respond,

and being prepared to respond

in a quick and informed way is crucial

in those kind of situations.

And as we've been hearing about today,

it's equally true for armed conflicts.

And this is showing, during World

War II, the city of Pisa in Italy.

And this is

locating the positions of important

cultural monuments

to be avoided in Allied

bombing at that time.

But as we've been hearing, it

is equally important today with armed

conflict,

and also for planning for

rehabilitation after conflicts.

And as we've been hearing,

also documentation of

cultural heritage prior to, during

and after conflicts has been

utilized for prosecutions

of acts of intentional and systematic

destruction of cultural heritage,

these crimes against humanity,

as it was in the Balkans in the 1990s

and prosecutions at The Hague.

So based on all of this experience,

the GCI and our partner

World Monuments Fund decided,

and also from our discussions

with many heritage

organizations around the world,

decided that there was a real need

in the heritage field

internationally for having

modern information technology

that is purpose-built for

cultural heritage organizations.

In cultural heritage data

and cultural heritage,

there are particular needs

of those organizations.

So that's when we decided to partner

together to develop Arches

as a system

for the international cultural heritage field.

So Arches is a modern, open source

software data management platform

purpose-built for organizations

to independently host

and manage their own inventories

of cultural heritage places.

And that was our intent, our

original purpose in developing Arches,

but since the first version was released

in 2013,

I believe we're now in

version seven of Arches,

its use is expanded beyond

inventories to lots of other cultural

heritage applications, where

information management is important.

So being open source,

the software is free.

There are no licensing fees, there are

no limits on the number of users.

It is enterprise-level software,

so it needs to be hosted on a server

or on the cloud.

Therefore, you do need IT

support for hosting and maintaining it.

Organizations can independently deploy

their own instance of Arches

within their organization,

which means they can also

make decisions about

how they want to manage their data

or make their data available.

And it's also supported

by a growing community of

both heritage organizations

and professionals, and also IT

professionals really around the world.

And we have an online forum

and we get excited

when someone new pops up from

a part of the world that we didn't know

someone was interested in Arches.

So just to dispel

some misconceptions that we've

heard numerous times in the past,

there is no one über-Arches

that is collecting data

from all around the world.

The organizations' own implementation

of Arches is independent

and they can choose to do what

they want with their own data.

Also, open source software

does not mean open data.

Those are two different things.

The software code is open,

which means it's available online.

It can also be modified if an organization

would like to enhance it or customize it.

So your data does not need

to be openly available

when using open source software.

That's really a choice to make.

So, let me just highlight

some of the features of Arches.

So this diagram, which I don't expect

anyone to be able to read, but it does

categorize different features

of Arches into some main categories.

One is data management,

another is data discovery

and visualization, and a third is

project and task management.

So data management includes

a robust module for creating and managing

controlled vocabularies, which can be

multilingual vocabularies if you wish.

You can design your own database

structure within

the software using

end-user interface.

And there are various ways

for end-users to input data.

Data discovery and visualization

includes the ability to

search by specific attributes.

The data is semantically structured

and that can include

temporal attributes, or location,

or lots of many other kinds of attributes.

And the project and task

management features include

something called Arches workflows,

which can allow an implementer

to customize a series of

data entry tasks or workflows

to meet their own business

processes or requirements.

So let me just show you

a couple of video clips

showing some functionality.

In this first case,

this is just showing that

you can create

new geometries showing the locations

of heritage resources. In this case,

this is showing the Statue

of Liberty in New York Harbor.

So a user can create multiple geometries

if needed and can also record locations

in a variety of other ways,

whether street addresses

or by property ownership boundaries

and so on. Or spatial data

can be imported

or exported.

You can also integrate

with a commercial GIS software,

such as [. . .], which some of

you might be familiar with.

In the next clip that I'll show,

this is showing some of the search

and discovery capabilities of Arches.

And this is a search through an implementation

of Arches through a project called

Endangered Archeology in the

Middle East and North Africa,

or EAMENA project, which is

supported by the Arcadia Fund.

So you can see on the satellite map,

these are clusters of archeological sites

that have been recorded across the Middle

East and North Africa.

Let me just start the

video clip. So I'll start

by entering in this gazetteer

search box in the upper right corner,

the name of the Aleppo Citadel in Syria.

And it will zoom to that location.

And then there's a historic

district in Aleppo known as Al Baiadah,

so it's zooming into that quarter,

and which was badly damaged

during the conflict in Syria.

And let's imagine that there's a plan

to redevelop that area.

So what you can do is, it's showing,

you can do a spatial search

in this case using a polygon,

and then you can create a buffer

around that location, if you like.

And it's showing all the recorded

cultural resources in that area.

So there were 23 in total, and you

can choose to click on the record

of any one of those

resources to get more details.

So in this case,

I've selected

a historic building

and then you can scroll through

the record for that resource

and find all the details

on that resource, the assessments,

and the historical functions

of that resource and so on.

So you might have noticed that

that resource report was in both English

and Arabic. And Arches

does have the ability to incorporate,

texts in different languages.

To date, we're aware of more

than 30 different languages

that are in use by different Arches

implementations around the world.

And just earlier this year

through the Arcadia Fund in London,

they provided support

for a comprehensive

internationalization of Arches,

which has been released earlier

this year in Arches Version 7.

And that provides the ability

to incorporate languages

regardless of the type of script

or direction of the script

and integration of multiple languages,

both in the user interface and in data.

So let's just take a little look at

a few different

uses of Arches around the world

by different organizations.

So this is a world map and it's showing

implementations that we're aware of.

And with our open source software,

no one has to inform us that they've

downloaded the software or installed it.

So we probably don't have

a complete picture.

But the red dots are implementations

that we know are live and in use.

In the blue dots are

implementations that we've heard

are either planned or they're

actively preparing those implementations.

So there are over 90 there,

that we're aware of.

So let me just walk

through a few examples

to kind of give you a flavor

of some different uses.

The first one is that

implementation I already mentioned,

which is actually shared

by two Arcadia-funded

projects, the Endangered

Archeology in the Middle East and

North Africa project, and also

a project called the Maritime

Endangered Archeology project.

They're both covering the same region

of the world, a 20-country region,

and to date they've recorded

over 330,000

what they consider endangered

archeological sites across that region.

Another implementation, the Nepal

Heritage Documentation project.

This one has also been

supported by Arcadia.

It was implemented

to focus on recording historical monuments

and objects spread over the Kathmandu

valley in the aftermath of

the 2015 earthquake there.

These instances are

online, so you could go

check out the data for yourself.

And the Arcadia Fund is

is currently supporting

at least ten projects like this,

that are all recording endangered heritage

in different parts of the world.

They're all implementing Arches.

And those projects cover

other regions, including Central

Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia,

sub-Saharan Africa, Mongolia.

There is a newer project that's focused

on endangered wooden architecture

all around the world. And

they're getting ready to

have some new projects

in Latin America.

Arches are also being used

in several parts of the world

to record heritage at risk

from the effects of climate change.

So in this example, the Florida

Public Archeology Network,

which is called FPAN,

they're using Arches

to track impacts to

archeological sites across the state,

and particularly

due to sea level rise.

And this is not Arches,

but this is just showing

geospatial analysis

that they've done

showing recorded

historical resources

that are at risk of impact

from climate change.

And what their

approach has been is

they're using Arches

as a hub for a statewide

in many cases volunteer crowdsourcing

effort, college heritage monitoring scouts,

where they're training volunteers

to go out and monitor

the conditions of these sites.

Here you see they're taking

photos and then they

inter that data in Arches as a way

to track changes and conditions

and if needed to respond

in terms of protection and so on.

This is another Arches

implementation here in the US.

And as mentioned, Los Angeles,

this is the city of Los Angeles,

implemented Arches as, they're

calling it Historic Places L.A.

And it's used by the City of L.A.

Planning Department, it is its official

cultural resource inventory.

To date, they've recorded more

than 50,000 cultural resources and

in the US, Arches has already also been

implemented by the city of Philadelphia.

And the city of San Francisco

is now in the process

of implementing Arches for a

part of a citywide survey.

In China the Dunhuang Academy,

which has been a long time

partner of the GCI,

they're deploying Arches

to create an inventory

and help manage hundreds

of Buddhist grottoes sites

in Gansu Province along the Silk Road.

And as you can see, many of these

grottoes contain elaborate Buddhist

wall paintings as well as painted sculptures.

And this screenshot from their Arches

implementation, it shows how they've

customized Arches

to enable real-time data

from different grottoes

environmental data

to be read within Arches.

So you can go to

a site record and see

temperature data,

relative humidity data,

visitor numbers and also carbon

dioxide data, which is important

when you have a lot of visitors,

where they have environmental sensors

in these grottoes.

And then as is the last example,

Historic England, which is

the national heritage authority in England.

They've been a key

collaborator of ours on the Arches

project since the very beginning.

They've adopted Arches

as a core information technology,

and they're now implementing

Arches for several uses,

including for the Greater London

Historic Environment Record,

which is basically the inventory

for Greater London.

They're already using

Arches for that internally.

And we're waiting to hear when

that will be launched sometime later

in the new year.

They're also using it for

England's national record

of the historic environment

and then to create a national marine

heritage record, as well.

So in closing, you can find out

more information about Arches

on the Arches project website

at www.archesproject.org.

That includes some information

on implementation, considerations.

There are also some IT service

providers that have developed

expertize with

Arches that can provide services.

There's a software development

roadmap there, where you can see

what upcoming development

is coming, and you can also

subscribe for announcements there.

And you can also join our

community forum if you like.

So that concludes my presentation.