AMAL in Heritage: An app for rapid conservation assessments for Arches

Paul Burtenshaw & Laura Cook, World Monuments Fund

What: This session will introduce the open-source “Amal in Heritage” mobile application to the Arches community. Developed by the World Monuments Fund (and previously the Global Heritage Fund), AMAL was designed as a highly intuitive, robust tool for rapid heritage conservation assessments in the field, particularly in crisis situations (see https://www.amal.global/). The app allows users to capture geo-located photographs, complete basic conservation assessments offline, and sync that data to a target database. We will demonstrate the app’s workflow, its underlying software architecture (including how it currently interfaces with the EAMENA Arches database via middleware), and our approach to field-data management.

Why: We are proposing a hybrid session because our primary goal is community dialogue. After a 10-minute presentation outlining the app’s current capabilities and API integrations, we wish to use the remaining time to lead a guided discussion. We want to learn directly from the Arches community if AMAL could serve as a generalized, out-of-the-box mobile client for any Arches instance. We are actively seeking feedback on what specific features, database mappings, or architectural changes would be required to transform this from a project-specific tool into a broadly useful utility for the entire Arches ecosystem.

Who: This session bridges the technical and the practical, targeting two main groups: End Users, Field Researchers, and Heritage Managers: To discuss the practicalities of rapid data collection. Developers and System Administrators: To discuss the open-source codebase, middleware translation, data repackaging, and potential ways for the app to communicate seamlessly with diverse Arches V7 databases.

How: Currently, Arches implementations often require organizations to build custom mobile apps or pay for expensive proprietary data-collection software. If we can adapt AMAL into a generalized tool, we can provide the community with a free, open-source, easily configurable mobile data-entry application. This would drastically lower the barrier to entry for mobile field data collection, standardize field-to-database pipelines, and save other organizations significant software development costs.