DELTOS- 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.
