H-KNOW: Advanced infrastructure for knowledge based services for buildings restoring

The restoration and conservation of heritage buildings in Europe is a highly specialized market, governed by the strict requirements of conservation principles and focused on very specific problems. Therefore, restorers, conservators and architects can hardly find appropriate solutions as the specific knowledge required is not always available on site. In the H-KNOW project an innovative solution has been developed through a networked platform whose conception starts from the creation of a cooperative infrastructure, so called H-KNOW Community followed by the creation of Collaborative Spaces. H-KNOW Community is a long-term strategic cooperative alliance of organisations aimed at offering the necessary conditions (e.g. human, financial, social, infrastructural & organisational) to support the rapid and fluid configuration of Collaborative Spaces. H-KNOW Community has the objective of preparing their members (SME and RTD performers) to be ready to collaborate in potential Collaborative Spaces that will be established when a collaboration (business) opportunity arises. On the other hand, Collaborative Spaces are timely limited, dynamic coalitions of organisations that may be tailored within a community to respond to a single collaboration (business) opportunity, and dissolve once their mission has been accomplished, and whose collaboration is supported through computer networks. For the purpose of modelling all features of H-KNOW Community, at the highest level of abstraction, the H-KNOW methodology was defined and developed according to the ARCON reference model. ARCON (A Reference Model for Collaborative Networks) is a modelling framework that comprehensively and systematically covers all the relevant features of identified H-KNOW networks. A Business Case has been developed which deals with Cultural Heritage restoration knowledge gathering and transferring it into learning content. Fundación Santa Maria de la Real (FSMLR) and TEUSA are two Spanish SMEs very active in the Cultural Heritage (CH) restoration, mainly from the Romanic period. Restoration of such monuments requires a lot of very specific knowledge so TECNALIA was involved as RTD. There is also a large amount of specific experience from restoration of Romanic objects in the whole Mediterranean area therefore an appropriate structuring of the large corpus, was collected from international sources, using the Knowledge Management (KM) services. The knowledge structuring was done aiming at its reuse in the future CH restoration works as a kind of e-Guidelines for Restoration, but also at creation of the content for training and its transfer to the learning content using e-learning (TEL) services.