COPECH 2012 - 3rd Track on Collaboration tools for Preservation of Environment and Cultural Heritage

Cultural heritage are increasingly exposed to degradation, in particular historical buildings and monuments due to their location, are directly exposed to the environment factors. Their preservation is a challenge involving many scientific areas, especially for the protection against environmental deterioration processes or natural hazards like earthquakes. Nowadays, mobile and wireless communications become a commodity and recently we have assisted to the emerging of wireless systems, mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and wireless opportunistic networks (WONs). These emerging communication paradigms open even more new opportunities for many interesting research topics targeting at concepts, methodologies and techniques to support advanced mobile value-added services. Clearly, the development environment of new algorithms, the kind of applications, architectures, and systems will have a significant impact for the successful deployment of alternative tools. On this basis, monitoring of Cultural Heritage in different scenarios may be crucial to develop methodologies that are tailored to complex systems. The aim of COPECH workshop is to bring together practitioners, engineers, scientists and researchers to give an overview on the Preservation of Environment and Cultural Heritage and also providing ideas exchange among specialists to exploit communication platforms and collaborative paradigm. The collaboration of specialists in Preservation of Environment and Cultural Heritage together ICT technicians will give the workshop a profile, mixing different technologies and strategies of intervention as result from cultural and technological practices.