DEVELOPING A MULTIMODAL DATABASE OF DIGITAL ARCHIVES FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE SITES – A CASE OF DIGITALLY PRESERVING THE BOROBUDUR TEMPLE OF INDONESIA

Abstract

Digital archives that support the three-dimensional (3D) digitization of cultural heritage sites are gaining popularity and attracting enormous interest as a critical strategy for digital preservation. This paper investigates the construction of a multimodal database for cultural heritage sites, which aims to preserve 3D data, images, videos and other materials along with multilingual text data. 3D scanning is widely used for efficient and accurate digitization of cultural heritages. However, some sites have been damaged entirely or partially, or sometimes, it is impossible to conduct 3D scanning of a portion of a site that is hidden from sight. At the Borobudur temple, a UNESCO World Heritage site, there are buried reliefs that are hidden at the basement and inaccessible for 3D scanning. Currently available data for these inaccessible portions of the site include old photos, computer-aided design (CAD) drawings and historical written descriptions. To digitally reconstruct 3D models of hidden parts, we introduce a method that use a single monocular photo. We constructed “Borobudur Visual Archives” to store, access, view and retrieve Borobudur-related digital assets, including the 3D data that we created.