The conservation process is iterative and interactive. Periodic updates stratify data across disciplines and time. Still the transition from raw data to structured knowledge is often slowed by procedural gaps and tooling limitations, creating a semantic divide between abundant digital resources and truly intelligible data. This article proposes a methodological and operational approach for managing the continuity of the information flow within a digitalization process functional to a conservation strategy for the Historical Built Heritage. A graph-structured semantic knowledge base was developed and it is fed by data from heterogeneous sources (Building Information Modeling, reality-based annotation platforms and graph databases), organized according to an explicit conceptual model for representing the building’s diachronic evolution. Interaction and querying are mediated by a prototypical multidimensional visualization environment. The experimentation has proven to anticipate contextualization, to rationalize mapping, to harmonize heterogeneous resources, and to formalize knowledge for sharing and querying. Calabrian heritage, which is part of the region’s identity and subject to natural and anthropogenic risks, is the case of interest. Application scenarios are exemplified in the experiment on San Giovannello, Gerace (RC).

The conservation process of a historic architectural building has the objective of a continuum of knowledge that originates in the past and must persist into the future (ISPC CNR, 2021), in the logic by which the components of architecture are internal to evolutionary processes that leave a tangible trace (Moioli and Baldioli, 2018). Thus, the digitisation of an architectural asset is a progression of knowledge capture and management. Its flow of information moves from observation to processing of data up to their contextualized digital representation. The next step is the ability to produce predictive content. This article explores the in-progress experimentation of a doctoral thesis. It is proposing a methodological contribution for the optimization of the information flow continuity within a digitisation process functional to a conservation strategy for the Historical Built Heritage. The instrumental result of the experiment is a query, visualization and inference environment optimized for the analysis of building transformation over time, to support diagnostic activities through multidimensional representation and access to a structured knowledge base. The integration between virtualization and descriptive information improves the understanding of the asset framed in a space-time system. The methodology was applied to the ecosystem of data on the conservation state of the church of San Giovannello di Gerace (RC) and considering the main transformations that have affected it over time.