Application of Digital Documentation in Vernacular Architecture Studies: Case of the Omani French Museum in Mutrah

In the past, heritage documentation and management relied fully on human labor, which includes: hand drawings, on-site measurements and pictures, etc. Such approach revealed to be time consuming and less precise, as heritage buildings have complex geometries. In recent years, remote sensing technologies have been playing key role in heritage documentation. However, the efficient transformation of remote-sensing data into as-built parametric smart models is currently an unresolved challenge. A pragmatic and organized Historic Building Information Modeling (HBIM) is essential in order to obtain a consistent model that can inform and integrate conservation and restoration work. This paper proposes a feasible, practical and replicable framework for developing HBIM by implementing emerging paradigms of open sourcing, photo-scan of existing structures, which is converted to intelligent objects with semantic attributes representing elements of building structure. The case study of Omani French Museum located in Mutrah (Oman) is used as an application example for the proposed framework.