Heritage Building Information Modelling (HBIM) as a model of UNESCO's World Heritage Nomination File

• Main Author: Baik, A. H.
• Published: University College London (University of London) 2017
• Subjects: 363.6
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.724628

Since the UNESCO constitution was established in 1945, and since the global convention for the protection of the World’s Cultural and Natural Heritage in 1972, a variety of challenges and issues have emerged in relation to providing UNESCO world heritage nomination files (WHNF). The UNESCO World Heritage have published a resource manual to help with the preparation of the nomination files. This manual is intended to provide basic principles and guidance to assist state parties as they begin the working process. However, the resource manual states that, “there are many different ways to prepare a nomination file” and there is no recommended method defined. This could provide validity to the task of improving and creating other methods to aid with preparing the nomination file. In the last decade, a number of traditional surveying methods have been used for several heritage sites in the world in order to provide the nomination files. However, these methods have proved unreliable as they have always missed out critical and comprehensive details, as well as taking a long time to process. As such, these issues can affect the UNESCO world heritage nomination and the world heritage community decisions. The concept of using terrestrial laser scanning and Photogrammetry has been utilised in many heritage sites around the world. Besides, the integration of the laser scanning output data and the Building Information Modelling (BIM) has also been introduced as a new method for documenting and managing these heritage sites and is known as Heritage BIM (HBIM). This research will focus on developing an interactive approach to the documentation, sharing, digitising, and management of the heritage buildings. This will be through collecting data from various sources, including geometrical, dimensional, historical, thematic, and constructive information, to be used as a new model for meeting the requirements of UNESCO’s WHNF. The HBIM method has been adopted for a case study of Historic Jeddah, which is described as Jeddah Heritage BIM (JHBIM) that focuses on Nasif Historical House, which is considered to be one of the most important historical houses in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The main reason for choosing this case study is due to the huge gap in the research in relation to heritage buildings, with almost no official architectural database or accurate records existing with regard to the buildings in Historic Jeddah.