Knowledge-based data warehouse of interventions for the protection of masonry historical heritage

The great social, cultural and economic losses caused by seismic events on the cultural heritage assets have stimulated, in the last decades, a great research effort in the development of new integrated knowledge-based approaches and tools for their protection from earthquake-induced risk. Great amounts of data have been collected and several databases developed so far to gather information about peculiar aspects on the seismic behaviour of masonry historical buildings. The detail level of such databases is usually influenced by the required survey or intervention, with a generalised lack of information on the fundamental parameters that affect the seismic response, i.e. boundary conditions, used materials, types of connections and constraints, etc. A global systematization is required, to take advantage from the considerable and precious amount of available data, linking all information on the basis of the relation between construction typologies and elements and failure mechanisms, including also survey and monitoring procedures and tools available in literature. A new web-based data warehouse was developed within the FP7 European research project NIKER (2010-2012) "new Integrated knowledge-based approaches to the protection of Cultural Heritage from Earthquake-induced Risk") to collect, systematize and analyse available data. This tool is able to link construction typologies and structural elements with collapse mechanisms into a matrix of interventions where end-users can easily select optimum solutions for the seismic improvement and assess the effectiveness, on the basis of pre- and post-intervention parameters. The interactive and dynamic functionalities, together with the capacity of cross-correlation of information at different knowledge levels and the sharing philosophy of a web-based system, make the data warehouse a powerful tool for a new innovative, integrated and knowledge based approach to the protection of cultural heritage, useful both to professionals and researchers.