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Developing Concepts and Methods for a Digital Cultural Atlas

Ian Johson
University of Sydney

The pilot Digital Cultural Atlas of Western Sydney (DCAWS) is building a flexible backend database and front-end web map interface to record and deliver a wide variety of historical and contemporary cultural
data for western Sydney.

In the course of DCAWS and a project on mapping Asian World Heritage sites for UNESCO, we have developed general concepts for structuring cultural data, and methodologies for capturing and updating data from existing databases, from field recording with GPS and digital cameras and from web-based community input.

The methods developed are applicable across a broad spectrum of projects which collect spatially-referenced cultural data, such as archaeological and heritage sites, historical records, photographs or community
information.