Compendium

Chronicle

Tour

Zuylen Castle

Integrated Landscape Information

A cultural landscape is the product of the continuous interaction between nature and human activities. Traces of these activities and resulting artifacts are visible in the landscape or can be found in museums, archives and libraries, sometimes at locations far away from the cultural landscape itself.

Cultural landscapes are also present on the Web. However, many websites provide information on isolated issues, while the relation with the cultural landscape itself is often difficult to grasp.

The Cultural Landscape Explorer project delivers a generic architecture and production methods for a web-based integrated information provision about cultural landscapes.

With regard to the cultural landscape we discern different genres of visual narratives. Each genre is a "lens" to view the landscape from a specific perspective:

• A visual compendium starts with geographic structures and continues with historical processes and events.
• A chronicle is based on a timeline and has its primary focus on historical events, which are stepping stones to processes.
• A tour spatially explores the landscape and draws attention to events and to traces of processes found on tour's itinerary.

These basic genres can be combined in different ways to create far more complex presentations: Rich Internet Applications (RIA) for the cultural domain, for example Zuylen Castle.

Test case: The Vecht

To study and demonstrate these concepts we chose the cultural landscape of the river Vecht (situated at the north of the city of Utrecht) as a test case.

Region of the river Vecht
(Utrecht, The Netherlands)

- See project page -