Documenation system for the administration of site monuments and preserved buildings of Crete

Contact person: Chryssoula Bekiari <bekiari@ics.forth.gr>

DELTOS is an information system, intended chiefly to address the needs of administrative documentation of site monuments and preserved buildings, including cartographic, geometric and photographic representation. It is designed to operate in a distributed environment and to cooperate with other systems, thus to be used as building block in configuring a geographically distributed national record of monuments.
The analysis of requirements for DELTOS was carried out in close co-operation with the 23rd Ephorate of Classical and Prehistorical Antiquities and the 13th Ephorate of Byzantine and Post-byzantine Antiquities, under the terms of the homonymous project. The system has been installed and is in use at the Archeological Museum of Heraklion, Crete, Greece.

Facilities & Structure

DELTOS is built on a relational database management system, but it can communicate with systems of different vendors or with systems other than databases. As the number of monuments in Crete alone is about 120.000, the system is designed to support records of hundreds of thousands of monuments, requiring several gigabytes of storage.
The system holds information concerning the physical location and state of a monument, its history, the legal status, bibliography, researchers, expropriations, funding, action approvals, etc. Monument descriptions are linked to cartographic and geometric representations, images and audio recordings. The system supports monument administration functions (e.g. registration, preservation monitoring, etc.) as well as data management functions, such as insertion, update and search operations, and multimedia presentation. Search operations support complex queries and are performed on both the structured data and the cartographic representation. All operations are performed and guided through a forms-based interface and facilitated by value lists where appropriate. For security purposes, DELTOS offers graded authorisation to users, access to tables, data entry and levels of use.
The system can operate in a centralized or distributed environment. It also supports operation over a network, according to a client-server scheme. For the implementation of DELTOS we used the Sybase RDBMS and AutoCad V12.0. The communication of the two systems is achieved using the C programming language.