Publication

Summary

In Norway, the protection of culture monuments has existed in organized ways for about 150 years. The most important law that regulate the cultural monuments and culture environments is ‘law on culture monuments’ and ‘living with culture monuments’. This law states that the cultural heritage is an important resource for knowledge and experience, and is important for the development of local communities and industrial values. However, it is a great scientifical and managemental problem that culture monuments seldom actually are in the appropriate national databases. Therefore, a thorough update and improval of these databases is needed. In this study we have focused on the quality of former positioning data for culture monuments. Except from two cases from the end of 1990’s, all culture monuments that we surveyed in this study were registered at the end of the 1960’s. Our study area was situated in Ringerike municipality, in southeastern Norway. The field work was carried out on 15 different areas with a total of 54 culture monuments during the period August through November 2004. In addition, control measures were performed against three fixed positions (”fastmerker”) and showed that the DPOS system has a discrepancy < 0.5 meters. We show that there exists a discrepancy between our DPOS measurements, the positions on economic maps (”ØK-kart”, 1:50 000) and the databases of the Directorate of Cultural Heritage (Askeladden). Four out of fifteen selected sites were not located on the economic maps. Further, of the 39 % we found within polygons marked on economic maps, 13 % showed a discrepancy from 1 to 5 meter, 13 % between 6 and 10 meter, 15 % between 11 and 20, and 20 % of all measures showed a discrepancy of more than 21 meter. The largest discrepancy in relation to the DPOS was 47 meters and the largest discrepancy between the different GPS models and DPOS was 17, 11 and 11 meters for Garmin Etrex, Garmin 12 XL and GeoExplorer, respectively. Thus, caution should be taken when using earlier locations in the use of area planning. Nevertheless, even inaccurate registrations could be better than no registration at all. GPS receivers exists in all different sorts and price classes. The precision varies from a few centimeters to several meters. The choice of a GPS receiver must therefore be done in relation to needs for precision. Hand-held GPS models is a rational way for registering culture monuments in the field, however, it may cause some incorrect positioning. GPS receivers have become common property and can result in an increase of culture monument registrations. A standard procedure for the registration process, e.g. thematic coding, will thus be needed. Information about the collected data (metadata) should also be available, so that the users can decide if the data is suitable for their purpose.