GEOMATIC TECHNOLOGIES TO VALORIZE HISTORICAL WATERMILLS

Abstract

The watermills, due to their technological innovation, represent a clear example of historical industrial heritage. A census campaign of water-powered grain mills was conducted in the Marche region (Italy). Almost 1,000 of them were counted, distributed throughout the regional territory in several water catchment areas. After a long multidisciplinary activity conducted among the Universities of Marche region, a geodatabase was implemented by GIS to map and register the historical watermills. The geodatabase is used to compose and manage an overall, uniform, homogeneous and expeditious cataloguing of the historical watermills distributed throughout the Marche region. In the second step, to get precise geospatial information, to obtain dimensional data, achieving metric and georeferenced 3D models, and to verify the real condition and state of preservation of them, 3D survey campaigns were conducted. In this phase, for some selected watermills the survey was carried out using geomatic sensors, such as photogrammetry and 3D LiDAR scanner. The final step of this research was to connect the 3D digital models from geomatics surveys in the GIS geodatabase, to enrich the collected historical documentation of the watermills, to improve their knowledge and valorization.