I’m pleased to announce that the cultural heritage project Farallon has been helping the Getty Conservation Institute and World Monuments Fund to build is now live for early access!
Arches is an open source, geospatial asset management system specifically tailored to the needs of the international cultural heritage field. It can inventory and document all types of immovable heritage, including buildings and other structures, cultural landscapes, heritage ensembles or districts, as well as archaeological sites.
Update Feb 25, 2013: Directions Magazine has published an article about Arches and its uses as both a technical and business solution.
We designed arches to effectively address the following cultural heritage requirements:
- Identification and inventory
- Research and analysis
- Monitoring and risk mapping
- Determining needs and priorities for investigation, research, conservation and management
- Planning for investigation, conservation, and management activities
- Raising awareness and promoting understanding among the public, as well as governmental authorities and decision makers
Arches is an evolution of our earlier work designing and developing MEGA and shares many of the same fundamental strengths including being: open source, standards-based, adaptable, multi-lingual and user-friendly for desktop, web and mobile workflows.
Below is the announcement:
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
The Getty Conservation Institute and World Monuments Fund are excited to tell you about a new, open source software application that we are developing for the heritage field. It is called Arches.
Arches is an open source geospatial information system that will be purpose-built to help heritage organizations inventory and manage all types of immovable cultural heritage. Arches is being developed to address the widespread need for low-cost electronic inventories that are easy to use and access. This collaborative effort combines state-of-the-art software development with the insights of heritage professionals from around the world.
You can find more information about Arches at http://archesproject.org.
Today, we are making available an early version of the Arches software code. Information technology specialists may download this version from https://bitbucket.org/arches/arches. We welcome you to assess it, and we hope to receive your feedback.
In June 2013, we will release a more advanced version of Arches that will be ready for heritage organizations to download, evaluate, customize, and deploy.
We encourage you to find out more about Arches, to let others know about it, and to consider more ways in which you can assist this effort.
