Digital Roman Forum
Launched in 2006 by the UCLA Experiential Technologies Center and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, this site publishes detailed reconstructions of the ancient Roman Forum and supporting information. This project was recently selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities for inclusion in The Best of Humanities on the Web.
From 1997 to 2003 the Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory created a digital model of the Roman Forum as it appeared in late antiquity. The notional date of the model is June 21, 400 A.D. The purpose of the modeling project was to spatialize information and theories about how the Forum looked at this moment in time, which was more or less the height of its development as Rome’s civic and cultural center. The digital model includes over twenty features (buildings and major monuments) filling up the western zone of the Roman Forum from the Temple of Vesta and Temple of Antoninus and Faustina on the east to the Tabularium facing the western slope of the Capitoline Hill.
With support from the National Science Foundation, we created this Web database to allow the free use and easy viewing of the digital model by people all over the world, to provide documentation for the archaeological evidence and theories utilized to create the model, and to offer basic information about the individual features comprising the digital model so that their history and cultural context can be readily understood. Using Semantic Web reasoning, the database illustrates the relationships between architectural spaces and documents that form the basis for the model’s topographical hypotheses.