Achieving the state of research pertaining to GIS applications for cultural heritage by a systematic literature review

Abstract

During the last decade, we have witnessed an increased interest in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), including the so-called “Historical GIS”, 3D GIS heritage and its subcategory of “SDI for cultural heritage”. Specific literature reviews, gathering and analysing the scientific production for Culture Heritage and GIS based research questions, are currently lacking. Therefore, the overall goal of this article is to provide an objective summary of the current state -of-the-art concerning how GIS has been used and what methods and analysis have been applied in the field of cultural heritage. In this sense, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of the literature on the application of GIS in cultural heritage is carried out. To do so, the WOS and Scopus databases were considered. The results show that the dominant application of GIS is in the realisation of inventory and cataloguing of archaeological and architectural heritage. As a result of the quantitative analysis, we also verify the principal sources in which most studies have been published, highlighting the "ISPRS Archives" with 14 publications, the "Lecture Notes in Computer Science" with 9, and "Proceedings of Digital Heritage" with 6 publications. These data show that the sources that most publis h mainly belong to the field of IT and Computer Science. In addition, the SLR shows that in the last three years there has been a greater tendency to use GIS to solve more specific problems of heritage through its use in conjunction with other tools such as BIM and photogrammetry