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By: Ranjan Singh
Student, Department of Architecture, Rizvi College of Architecture, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Architectural heritage – including historic buildings, monuments, landscapes, and traditional urban fabric – constitutes a vital repository of cultural, aesthetic, and scientific values. Digital archiving such heritage is increasingly necessary for preservation, research, documentation, education, and public engagement. However, the effectiveness of digital archives depends vitally on the metadata standards used: the structure, semantics, interoperability, and preservation of metadata can enable or hinder access, reuse, long‐term sustainability, and meaningful comparisons across collections. This comparative review examines leading metadata standards, schemas, and application profiles currently applied or proposed for architectural heritage, including MIDAS‑Heritage, CARARE, CIDOC‑CRM and its extensions, European Data Model (EDM), Encoded Archival Description (EAD/EAD3), and ontology‑driven approaches such as RiC‑O extensions and the ITDT ontology. Through analysis of published case studies, technical documents, and recent research, we compare these in terms of (i) scope (what kinds of heritage assets, what digital resources), (ii) descriptive richness (what elements, properties, semantics), (iii) interoperability (how easily data can be shared, aggregated, linked), (iv) scalability and granularity (levels from monument to component, 2D/3D, geometry, Para data), (v) implementation complexity and costs, (vi) compliance with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles, and (vii) challenges – both technical (e.g., handling 3D, temporal changes, geometry) and organizational (skills, workflows, institutional inertia). The review finds that no single standard covers all needs: standards like CARARE built on MIDAS serve well for aggregation and heritage‑asset centric digital resources; CIDOC‑CRM and linked data models provide strong semantic interoperability; EAD/EAD3 excels for archival and documentary collections; ontology extensions are promising for modelling complex project processes. The article concludes with recommendations for hybrid and modular metadata frameworks, best practices in implementation, and directions for future research, particularly in automated metadata enrichment, handling of 3D/temporal data, and community‑driven vocabularies.
Keywords: Architectural heritage, digital archives, metadata standards, cultural heritage documentation, semantic interoperability
Citation:
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