Livio De Luca: the new Notre Dame

A year before the fire of the Cathedral, De Luca created a revolutionary platform called Aïoli. “It is a collaborative and three-dimensional semantic annotation platform that allows you to bring together scientific data from multiple actors ". The annotations are processed by the platform that produces 3D images, which are constantly evolving because they are fed by the various data entered. In the case of the Notre Dame site, of 120 researchers working on materials, structural and acoustic behaviors and also on social and anthropological elements”.

Aïoli is in fact the instrument at the base of the scientific site that deals with the study and digital reconstruction of the Cathedral. Its starting point was the various surveys that took place before the fire. “Notre Dame had been documented, in the years prior to 2019, by several scholars. Among these, Andrew Tallow, professor of Art and Architecture at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie (USA), who had digitized it with a 3D laser scanner. These data, as well as those of other previous surveys, were valuable for the start of the scientific site”, says Livio De Luca.

But what exactly are the scholars doing? An extremely complex work that involves the reconstruction of a geometric datum starting from the photographs. “On the one hand, we record a person's gaze on the building, which is the photograph, extract the coordinates and store the annotations made on the photos (in two dimensions) to automatically extract three-dimensional information”. From this derives the spatialization of the image and the multiple associated annotations. The more data is entered, the more the Cathedral takes shape.

“Every single remainder of the fire is analyzed by several experts: crossing our gazes, we can reconstruct where it was inside the Cathedral, its composition and its origine”.

A cognitive and semantic investigation, that of the scientific site, which supports and accompanies the operational site and which helps it, for example, to recompose by anastylosis. But it also has its own value regardless: this ecosystem will be able to memorize a situation that will not necessarily be expressed by the restoration site, but will remain an important digital memory that already today reveals technical-constructive details, in this case linked to the Gothic style, which before they didn't know each other. A digital born cultural heritage that will also become a valuable tool for future researchers.