Arches Dunhuang: Heritage Inventory System for Conservation of Grotto Resources on the Gansu Section of the Silk Road in China

A pioneering heritage inventory system, ARCHES DUNHUANG, has been developed to safeguard the Buddhist grottoes along China's Gansu Silk Road section. This system leverages open-source Arches platform, integrating semantic graph data modeling and CIDOC-CRM ontology to ensure robust data management, interoperability, and longevity. The project demonstrates how flexible design tools like Arches Designer can be tailored to meet specific conservation needs while providing intuitive visualization through grottoes map plugins. By standardizing data collection and analysis, this system offers a scalable model for managing other Silk Road heritage sites in China and beyond, marking a significant advancement in cultural resource preservation.

Wang, X., Gong, Y., Myers, D., & Wang, S. (2021). ARCHES DUNHUANG: HERITAGE INVENTORY SYSTEM FOR CONSERVATION OF GROTTO RESOURCES ON THE GANSU SECTION OF THE SILK ROAD IN CHINA. The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, XLVI-M-1-2021, 837–843. https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-xlvi-m-1-2021-837-2021