The Forma Urbis Romae Fragment Database

list of the 435 fragments in the public database	clickable map showing how the wall is divided into marble slabs	web page for fragment #010g with links to color photographs and 3D models

Click on any of these screenshots to jump into our public database at the indicated web page.

The Forma Urbis Romae, also known as the Severan Marble Plan, is a giant marble map of ancient Rome. One of the primary goals of Stanford's Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project has been to build a publically-accessible, web-browsable, relational database of the 1,186 known fragments of this famous map. As of June 2005, we have assembled 3D models for all the fragments, representing about 8 billion polygons, and we've built a database giving scholars access to these models and a corresponding set of color photographs. Our database was built using mySQL and PHP, two industry-strength, open-source web database tools.

There are actually two versions of our database, one for scholars and one for the public. The scholar's version contains high-resolution color photographs and downloadable 3D models. These models are typically stored as PLY files (extension .ply), a Stanford-invented format for storing dense polygon meshes. These files can be displayed using Scanalyze, our system for aligning, merging, and manipulating range data. For faster display on PCs and Macs, these models are also available as QSplat files (extension .qs), based on our QSplat multi-resolution point-based rendering system. Access to this version of the database requires a free license, obtainable by writing to us, but is available only to archaeologists and other scholars who work on the Forma Urbis Romae. The public version of the database contains half-resolution color photographs and 3D models stored as ScanView files (extension .svm). These can be interactively viewed (but not downloaded) using ScanView, our remote rendering system for visualizing scanned models. Access to this version of the database requires no license. For a technical description of the ScanView system, read our SIGGRAPH 2004 paper or the June 2005 issue of CACM.

The pictures above are screenshots from the public version of our database. Here is a brief description of each screenshot:

• At left is the list of all the fragments in the database, one fragment per line. So far, only 435 fragments are online, but this number will gradually grow to include all 1,186 surviving fragments, plus Renaissance-era drawings depicting a number of additional fragments that were known at that time but have since been lost. (Note: by special arrangement with the Comune di Roma, the public is allowed to download as well as view the geometry for a small subset of the fragments in the public database, including #010g above. The web pages for these fragments include links to both ScanView and PLY files. These fragments are indicated in the list by a star (*) after the fragment number.)

• At center is a clickable map of the 60-foot by 45-foot wall of the Templum Pacis on which the map was hung in ancient times. The wall was divided into 250 marble slabs measuring roughly 3 feet by 6 feet. To get you oriented, our map shows the Tiber River and a few of the ancient city's principal monuments. Note that South is up on this map, as it was on the original. By clicking on one of the rectangular slabs, you are brought to a list of fragments that are known to lie on that slab. Some of these slab lists are empty, indicating that no fragments have (yet) been identified as lying in that part of the city.

• At right is the web page for one example fragment, #010g, which has been identified as lying in the ancient (and somewhat seedy) neighborhood called the Subura. The data fields on the left side of this web page give the numbers by which the fragment has been labeled over the centuries, its inscriptions and other physical characteristics, its location in the ancient city, links to a web page about the marble slab it resides in, links to physically adjoining fragments, and many other details. To the right side of these data fields are links to digitized plates from Carettoni's monumental 1960 study of the map (upper-right), and links to our own high-resolution color photographs (upper-left) and 3D computer models (lower-right). Below these images is a text analysis of the fragment, giving its history, identification, and significance,.

Click on any of the screenshots above to connect to the public database. Also available is an extensive bibliography of books and articles about the map and a glossary of terms used in the database. Finally, click here for a a detailed explanation of how to use the database, and here for the home page of the Classic's Department's web site about the Forma Urbis Romae Project. This web site provides an alternate entry point for the database.