Technologies for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage—A Systematic Review of the Literature

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This work is a systematic literature review regarding the preservation of cultural heritage and novel technologies/mediums that were used in order to achieve this goal from 2018 to 2022. The authors review a wide range of relative papers and categorize them depending on cultural heritage subtype (tangible/intangible), technology used, data acquisition method and different other criteria. 

 

The purpose of this paper is to inform the reader about the research, regarding the preservation of cultural heritage. It focuses on works published in the last four years, which is a plus, since we get to see new studies, we probably have not heard about before. As far as I know, no other paper has conducted a systematic literature review in the field of cultural heritage regarding work in the last four years.

 

Overall, the manuscript is easy to read. The sections are clear and easy to follow. The level of English is right and there are no syntax errors, making it very well-written. The way the authors chose to present their work is outstanding. They categorize the papers based on different data, including multiple tables for this categorization. By looking at one row of a table, one gets to understand what the specific paper aims, how it achieves its goal, the monument it refers to, the technology used, the methods and many more. Also, the authors include a variety of diagrams for the readers to achieve a better understanding of the work they accomplished on how they managed to find all these papers and distinguish them from others. 

 

The results of this paper consist of the actual review of the research made in the field of cultural heritage. The results are presented in detail, with diagrams and very well-made categorization. The readers can easily understand the main topic of each article and note the database that was found just by looking at the corresponding table row. The reference of each paper is also part of the table, so the readers can easily locate the paper and read it for more information if they would like. 

Although this systematic literature review is well constructed, there are some other interesting references/works in the field of cultural heritage (2018-2022) that are missing and could be included as well. Some of them are: 

1.     Geronikolakis, E., Tsioumas, M., Bertrand, S., Loupas, A., Zikas, P., Papagiannakis, G., “New Cross/Augmented Reality Experiences for the Virtual Museums of the Future”, In: Ioannides M. et al. (eds) Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection. EuroMed 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11196. Springer, Cham, 2018, also presented in Euromed 2018

 

2.     Comes, R.; Neamțu, C.G.D.; Grec, C.; Buna, Z.L.; Găzdac, C.; Mateescu-Suciu, L. Digital Reconstruction of Fragmented Cultural Heritage Assets: The Case Study of the Dacian Embossed Disk from Piatra Roșie. Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8131. https://doi.org/10.3390/app12168131

 

 

3.     Papaefthymiou M., Kanakis M.E., Geronikolakis E., Nochos A., Zikas P., Papagiannakis G., “Rapid Reconstruction and Simulation of Real Characters in Mixed Reality Environments”, In: Ioannides M. (eds) Digital Cultural Heritage. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10605. Springer, Cham, 2018

 

4.     Barbera, R. et al. (2022). A Pipeline for the Implementation of Immersive Experience in Cultural Heritage Sites in Sicily. In: Furferi, R., Governi, L., Volpe, Y., Seymour, K., Pelagotti, A., Gherardini, F. (eds) The Future of Heritage Science and Technologies: ICT and Digital Heritage. Florence Heri-Tech 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1645. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20302-2_14

 

5.     Li, Y., Ch’ng, E. (2022). A Framework for Sharing Cultural Heritage Objects in Hybrid Virtual and Augmented Reality Environments. In: Ch'ng, E., Chapman, H., Gaffney, V., Wilson, A.S. (eds) Visual Heritage: Digital Approaches in Heritage Science. Springer Series on Cultural Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77028-0_23

 

6.     Stefanidi, E., Partarakis, N., Zabulis, X., Adami, I., Ntoa, S., Papagiannakis, G., “Transferring Traditional Crafts from the Physical to the Virtual World: An Authoring and Visualization Method and Platform”, ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (20-0165), 2020

 

7.     Fotis Giariskanis, Yannis Kritikos, Eftychia Protopapadaki, Anthi Papanastasiou, Eleni Papadopoulou, and Katerina Mania. 2022. The Augmented Museum: A Multimodal, Game-Based, Augmented Reality Narrative for Cultural Heritage. In ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences (IMX '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 281–286. https://doi.org/10.1145/3505284.3532967

 

8.     Geronikolakis, E., Zikas, P., Kateros, S., Lydatakis, N., Georgiou, S., Kentros, M., Papagiannakis, G., “A True AR Authoring Tool for Interactive Virtual Museums”, In: Visual Computing in Cultural Heritage, Liarokapis, F., Voulodimos, A., Doulamis, N., Doulamis, A. (Eds.), Springer-Nature, Series on Cultural Computing, 2020

 

9.     Chung, N., Lee, H., Kim, J.-Y., & Koo, C. (2018). The Role of Augmented Reality for Experience-Influenced Environments: The Case of Cultural Heritage Tourism in Korea. Journal of Travel Research, 57(5), 627–643. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047287517708255

Author Response

Thank you very much for your appreciation,

From the recommended bibliography, three articles were added which are:

1. Geronikolakis, E., Tsioumas, M., Bertrand, S., Loupas, A., Zikas, P., Papagiannakis, G., “New Cross/Augmented Reality Experiences for the Virtual Museums of the Future”, In: Ioannides M. et al. (eds) Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection. EuroMed 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11196. Springer, Cham, 2018, also presented in Euromed 2018
2. Comes, R.; Neamțu, C.G.D.; Grec, C.; Buna, Z.L.; Găzdac, C.; Mateescu-Suciu, L. Digital Reconstruction of Fragmented Cultural Heritage Assets: The Case Study of the Dacian Embossed Disk from Piatra Roșie. Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 8131. https://doi.org/10.3390/app12168131
3. Geronikolakis, E., Zikas, P., Kateros, S., Lydatakis, N., Georgiou, S., Kentros, M., Papagiannakis, G., “A True AR Authoring Tool for Interactive Virtual Museums”, In: Visual Computing in Cultural Heritage, Liarokapis, F., Voulodimos, A., Doulamis, N., Doulamis, A. (Eds.), Springer-Nature, Series on Cultural Computing, 2020

 

We thank you again for your recommendations.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper presents an interesting and updated literature review related to the technologies for the preservation of cultural heritage. Even if the SLR has been rigorously performed, the authors should include more references of previous SLRs in the related works by clearly highlighting their differences. Here are two examples:

Bekele M.K., Pierdicca R., Frontoni E., Malinverni E.S., Gain J.
A survey of augmented, virtual, and mixed reality for cultural heritage
(2018) Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 11 (2), art. no. 7, DOI: 10.1145/3145534

Tavares, D.; Alves, F.; Vásquez, I. The Relationship between Intangible Cultural Heritage and Urban Resilience: A Systematic Literature Review. Sustainability 2021, 13(22), 12921; https://doi.org/10.3390/su132212921.

Having long tables within the text makes reading the paper difficult. I suggest the authors summarize the main contribution of the tables within the text and move tables to the paper's appendix.

Finally, the SLR acronym is sometimes misspelled: line 73, table 3, and 396.

 

 

Author Response

Respectful greetings,

We appreciate the comments corresponding to the revision of our article, which has allowed us to increase the quality of the document and adapt it to the requirements of the journal. The document has change markers enabled and all modifications have been highlighted in red. Our response to your comments is presented below:

 

Point 1: The paper presents an interesting and updated literature review related to the technologies for the preservation of cultural heritage. Even if the SLR has been rigorously performed, the authors should include more references of previous SLRs in the related works by clearly highlighting their differences. Here are two examples:

 

Bekele M.K., Pierdicca R., Frontoni E., Malinverni E.S., Gain J.

A survey of augmented, virtual, and mixed reality for cultural heritage

(2018) Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 11 (2), art. no. 7, DOI: 10.1145/3145534

 

Tavares, D.; Alves, F.; Vásquez, I. The Relationship between Intangible Cultural Heritage and Urban Resilience: A Systematic Literature Review. Sustainability 2021, 13(22), 12921; https://doi.org/10.3390/su132212921.

 

Response 1: Thank you very much for your appreciation,

From the recommended bibliography, one article was added:

1. Tavares, D.; Alves, F.; Vásquez, I. The Relationship between Intangible Cultural Heritage and Urban Resilience: A Systematic Literature Review. Sustainability 2021, 13(22), 12921; https://doi.org/10.3390/su132212921.

We thank you again for your recommendations.

 

Ponit 2: Having long tables within the text makes reading the paper difficult. I suggest the authors summarize the main contribution of the tables within the text and move tables to the paper's appendix.

Response 1: Table 6 is long, since it relates 45 articles on 3D digital technologies, its location is imperative to keep a logical order of the writing, we are willing to abide by its recommendation with the approval of the editor.

 

Ponit 3: Finally, the SLR acronym is sometimes misspelled: line 73, table 3, and 396.

 

Response 1: Corrected errors in the acronym SLR

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

If an academic study is being prepared, the importance and value it provides, its academic and practical contributions, and the literature gaps should be clearly expressed. I do not see these features in this study. You have only made a classification, and there is no novelty you have introduced. SLR is just a process in scientific research. You have made a good preparation, but you need a suggestion based on these results. You can propose a conceptual model, or you can analyze the data collected with various methods (a survey). This work, filled with many tables and not very useful to the reader, needs to be expanded.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your appreciation,

The study makes a comparison between the different technologies applied for the preservation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage with the purpose of serving as references for the construction of an ontological model to be consumed by the architecture of a technological platform for the preservation of intangible cultural heritage that is in the process of development.

It is important to know that work is being done in this field and the review shown in the article makes an analysis of the application of different technologies (3D digital technologies, AR/VR, IoT and others) that are used for the same purpose.

If you look at Figure 8 it can be seen that 92% of the application of technology in cultural heritage is given in tangible heritage, requiring more work in the preservation of intangible heritage as in the case of traditional Colombian vallenato, Spanish Flamenco, the Carnival of Barranquilla, among others.

Likewise, the article shows which techniques (photogrammetry, laser scanning, among others) and technological tools (software, equipment, devices) have been most used for the preservation of cultural heritage.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors partially accomplish my requests. I still think that long tables, due to the long text inside, make poor readable the paper. If the placement of those tables is mandatory, I suggest summarising the text inside; a reader can get further information by directly reading the referenced article.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your appreciation

Very respectful greetings

The recommendations were implemented, in the new document you can see that table 6 was sent to the appendix, being now Table 11. Also, this table was considerably reduced from 11 pages to 8 pages.
Table 9 was also reduced.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The changes I mentioned in my first report have not been taken seriously, and there is no necessary improvement.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your appreciation

Very respectful greetings

The recommendations were implemented, in the new document you can see that table 6 was sent to the appendix, being now Table 11. Also, this table was considerably reduced from 11 pages to 8 pages.
Table 9 was also reduced.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf