A Geospatial and Time-based Reconstruction of the Venetian Lagoon in a 3D Web Semantic Infrastructure

Throughout the early modern period, the over sixty islands shaping the Venetian lagoon constituted an integral component of Venice’s urban framework. The ERC Starting Grant project Venice’s Nissology (VeNiss) reconstructs this dilapidated cultural heritage site by examining the urban, architectural, and social patterns connecting the capital with its aquascape through a web-based research infrastructure accessible to the broad public. With the idea of understanding and visually narrating the many transformations of Venice’s lagoon settlements over time, this research employs a cutting-edge methodological approach to effectively capture both the physical and functional changes that have occurred to these built works throughout the centuries. Leveraging on the most advanced digital tools (i.e., digital photogrammetric and laser scanner surveys, HGIS mapping, HBIM modelling, and semantic technologies), researchers and the general public alike can explore the material alterations of the islands’ spaces while interactively discovering their historical, socio-economic and cultural changes. This paper proposes an innovative operational methodology that, through a semantic data model and knowledge graph, develops a 3D geospatial and time-based semantic infrastructure. This platform acts as a comprehensive repository that integrates and renders navigable historical data, research findings and 2D and 3D interoperable models, which allows for a nuanced representation of the articulated and long-term relationships that once bonded the cluster of islands with the historical city centre and states across the Italian Peninsula and the Mediterranean.