Integrated and multiscale spatial data to base a gis for the ancient city of hierapolis in Phrygia

Many historycal, architectural and archaelogical studies pointed on ruins and excavations of the ancient city of Hierapolis, had provided building plans that have been recently collected in a urban map carried out through traverses surveying. (A GPS network connected to total station closed traverses assured reliable accuracy levels required for urban scale map 1:1000) The last project (2002), integrating relief terrain representation to the map, and global spatial data accuracy assessment, offered the chance to gain a digital map of the site. This topographical base is the fundamental spatial information of the growing GIS, aimed to manage heterogeneous nature data, obtained from different fields of study. This paper underline the need of multiscale spatial data for archaeological GIS; at the same time we explain the reasons of helpful features of this proper site map. Moreover, the continuous map updating is managed together with geometric entities editings; this task implies suitable reorganization of data. On the close-range side, large scale surveys are warmly requested; according to the urban scale sphere, we integrate just acquired data with new focused datasets, achieved by digital photogrammetry or with topographic methods. Purposes are various: ruins stability control, modern walls analyses, falling down studies, excavations documentation that need close range nadiral images (we used a jib-crane for acquisitions). Every level and type of geometric data is the metric reference for a huge amount of data sets collected in a relational database: images storages and alphanumeric data sets, come, at the moment, from a typical architectural interpretation of wall stone or marble blocks. Sharing informations is one of the main need of an archaeological site managing, and a carefully planned GIS can aid to gain the goal.