BUILDING ARCHAEOLOGY DOCUMENTATION AND ANALYSIS THROUGH OPEN SOURCE HBIM SOLUTIONS VIA NURBS MODELLING

Abstract. The implementation of historical information within BIM (Building Information Modelling) platforms has experienced great development processes during last years, generating excellent studies based on Historic Building Information Modelling (Murphy et al., 2009; 2013). The HBIM developing growth is certainly explained due to advantages concerning the documentation step as well as monitoring operations for Cultural Heritage assets. In this sense, information concerning historical architectures can be extracted directly from walls and masonries and it is related to stratigraphic information derived from archaeological analysis: this kind of analysis is fundamental in order to comprehend the evolution of the construction site through the identification of layers due to modifications and actions (Parenti R., 2000).

The inclusion of stratigraphic analysis inside a HBIM workflow could be an innovative point as far as the management and monitoring is concerned. This kind of documentation, that was not designed to be included inside a common BIM platform, could be collected coupled with digital metric information derived from metric surveys even if it is still considered an ongoing research field, especially since Cultural Heritage assets have no BIM standard classification. For this reason, the main goal of this research is to adapt the possibilities of open source solutions concerning BIM methodologies to building archaeology documentation and analysis exploring unconventional strategies and also overcoming 3D modelling limitations of BIM software with free form modeler based on NURBS algorithm (Oreni et al., 2014), developing a particular scan-to-BIM process that, owing to the used opens source solutions and algorithm, can be renamed scan-to-openBIM via NURBS.