PreserVenice: Preserving the Material Culture of Venice

This project was conducted under the auspices of UNESCO for the purpose of promoting the preservation and restoration of Venetian material culture. Consisting of over 7,000 individual pieces compiled by WPI project teams over the past 20 years, this collection constitutes the most complete and comprehensive catalog of Venetian material culture to date. By centralizing the catalog on the Venipedia.org site through the creation of over 3,000 wiki pages, our group was able to make data readily available to the public. In addition, we expanded the database by 127 decorative keystones and added over 50 traditional Venetian watercraft to the catalog. As a means of further publicizing the catalog, we created an augmented reality mobile application capable of providing users with information pertaining to individual pieces of public art while in the streets of Venice. Finally, we established a priority and cost analysis system, to be used in conjunction with crowdsourcing, in order raise awareness and collect donations for the restoration of these pieces