Integration of Diverse Geomatics Backgrounds for the Documentation of Cultural Heritage. A Summer School on Pogoni’s Stone Bridges

Abstract. The paper describes the training activity -a summer school- that took place in Pogoni, in the Greek region of Epirus, in the summer of 2024. The school's main objective was to train students from diverse backgrounds on the digitization of historical Cultural Heritage. Specifically, this school, however, tackled very specific features regarding its main subject (heritage) and the knowledge addressed in it. The cultural heritage subject of the digitization was a small number of stone bridges in the Pogoni region of Greece. These bridges, which can be ascribed to a fairly broad historical period, are, however, characterised by strong similarities that configure them as a widespread, albeit punctiform, heritage. These include the materials used, construction techniques, and locations. These characteristics require a comprehensive disciplinary approach. The discipline of Geomatics, characterised by the common goal of measuring, from the Earth down to the small objects, with known precision, has within it several interests related both to the development of tools and technologies used and to their application. The students who participated in Pogoni's summer school had diverse backgrounds (from engineering to architecture) and found themselves among their teaching staff in a group of experts in digitization for cultural heritage, GIS, GNSS, and SLAM, articulated among academic faculties from architecture and engineering schools. This activity was an opportunity for educational growth for the students as well as professional exchange for the faculty. The results reflected the different deliverables of the summer school, not only in the first papers produced during the school, but also in the final products (georeferenced point clouds, drawings, orthophotos, master’s degree thesis), which were collected in a dedicated spatial information system.