Perceptibility of archaeological values at the urban sites in GIS environment; the case study ancient city of Side

Cities, constantly evolve as a result of consecutive settlement processes, change with differences of each new period which also brings along the components of the previous period and accumulate. In order to conserve and to ensure the continuity of conservation of the cities and their components, the information the city contains must be evaluated and perceived in a comprehensive and accurate manner. In this context, in this thesis examining the perceptibility of archaeological values at the urban sites in environment of Geographical Information Systems is aimed. The raw data carried by the cultural property is provided to be transformed into usable information via transferring the data to the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and analyzing it. For this purpose, the practice was carried out on the ancient city of Side. The thesis is composed of four main parts including theoretical part and the application parts that dealt with the area of the study. In the first part, the conservation approach at the archaeological sites is discussed within the historical process and examples of integration of the GIS to conservation processes were examined. In the second part, general features and historical development of Side which is selected as the study area, are stated. After that, the data obtained from the field and from different sources were analyzed transferring them to the GIS environment. In the third part evaluations are made towards the intent in the light of the analyses. In the last chapter, the perception route is proposed and the results for integration of GIS to conservation process have been demonstrated. Key Words: Conservation, Cultural heritage, Urban site, Archaeological value, Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Ancient city of Side