Transparency, interaction, communication and open source in Virtual Archaeologuy

While 3-dimensional visualization methods are now employed in a wide range of contexts to assist in the research and communication of cultural heritage, it is now recognized that, to ensure that such work is intellectually and technically rigorous, and for its potential in this domain to be realized, there is a need both to establish standards responsive to the particular properties of 3d visualization, and to identify those that it should share with other methods (London Charter, March, 2006). In the last years indeed, the widespread of powerful software, hardware, devices and the exponential growing of digital models built by a wide community, forced researchers to get to a new need, before rarely perceived. If scientific publications have always been a reference instrument in the humanities branch, and not only, what kind of reference can be pointed out in the digital domain? The paper will face up, first of all, into some general observations on what we have to intend with "scientific" in this field, and some possible solutions will be then taken into account, such as transparency, interaction, communication, dynamic modeling, epistemology and "open" approach. The "Flaminia" project (the ancient and famous Roman road), and its VR network, will be proposed as case study and example for the discussed thesis.

In the field of cultural heritage there are a few virtual reality applications oriented to scientific communities, interested to the dynamic exchange and sharing of data, methodologies, cultural contents. In the most of cases, VR projects are dedicated to a wide public fruition; even for this reason, their main goal is to communicate, reconstruct and interact, using the virtual environment, at least in the best cases, as final result of a long process of study and interpretation integrating bottom-up and top-down methodologies [FP05]. Very rarely they encourage a real discussionaboutmethodologicalapproaches, interpretative processes followed in the reconstruction of present and ancient cultural contexts. They show only the final result, selecting few types of data, omitting which kind of sources were used, which data and methodology, considering in this way communication as totally separated from knowledge. VR applications realized with this approach can produce and show just models and environments closed and not transparent. Users have no possibility to understand how those representations have been obtained. Therefore they can not decode information they are receiving, nor analyze it or give any evaluation with critical awareness. This situation is quite peculiar in the virtual heritage domain; other fields such as medicine, industrial prototyping, military simulations can produce today virtual reality applications in a more transparent way. In fact, it is important to allow scientific community and experts in virtual heritage to participate more actively in the process of creating and re-creating VR applications for communication, didactics and research. Transparency is becoming one of the key-concepts in the discussion about virtual reality and cultural heritage, especially inside the scientific community, even if it is difficult to find VR applications and case studies following this issue. An initial discussion, preceded by a first initiative called CVRO(http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/nsr/cvro/wo rkshop.html) [FNRB04], was started in February 2006 during an international meeting that was held in London and organized by King's College 3D Visualisation Laboratory. At the end of the meeting, where the topic was discussed from different points of view by worldwide researchers, a first document was produced, the so called "London Charter". It is still an in progress document, presented also in Eva2006 in Florence, and it will published together with the proceedings of the conference in "Behaviors, Interactions and Affordance in Virtual Archaeology" [FP06]. It was an important opportunity where a representative part of the scientific community who works in the field of virtual heritage, expressed the need to identify some guidelines for the future, starting from a common consideration. Until now, in fact, we have produced and we are still producing thousands different digital models for many purposes. Most of these models are forgotten or not available outside very restrict groups, with no benefit for the worldwide community. There is obviously a problem of access of something that should be common patrimony. This problem is then strictly connectedwithcommunicationissues:without communication there is no access to information. But there is also another question that should be considered, that has a strong impact on the future of scientific research: how can a digital model can be defined as "scientific"? How can we give any opinion on it and how can be used to help interpretation? And finally how can we introduce it fully in the scientific process, that uses, at present, just printed publications? Some suggestions will be discussed here, oriented toward two possible solutions that could be integrated: transparency intended as an interactive process in VR and as an open source process that can help data sharing.