Documentation analysis and organisation are vital to the researcher when trying to understand the evolution of patrimonial edifices and sites. Documentary sources provide partial evidences from which the researcher will infer possible scenarios on how an edifice may have been changed throughout the centuries. They are the only scientific basis from which virtual renderings can be proposed and justified. Still, in the field of the architectural heritage, there is a gap to fill between well established data management technologies that provide solutions for documentation handling, and geometric modelling techniques that underlie reconstruction efforts.
Documentation is organised with regards to what the documents are, books, illustrations, etc... Virtual renderings feature a geometry that bears no link to the documentation's analysis. Our contribution introduces a solution for attaching the documentation to architectural concepts that represent physical beings used in the edifice's structure, and this without modifications on existing documentation descriptions. Three dimensional scenes can then be used as one of the means to retrieve or visualise the information we hold on the edifice's or site's evolution. Our position is that the 3D representation of architectural objects can be an efficient filter on the set of data architects, conservators or archaeologists handle.
This research is experimented on data sets concerning the city of Kraków (Poland) and its architectural evolutions, in the framework of a franco-polish research programme.