February 26, 2013 -- Arches is an open source, geospatial asset management system specifically tailored to the cultural heritage field.  Arches inventories, documents, and preserves key information about all types of immovable cultural heritage, including buildings and other structures, cultural landscapes, heritage ensembles or districts, as well as archaeological sites.  

Farallon Geographics was selected by the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) and World Monuments Fund (WMF) to help prototype and develop Arches.  Farallon was responsible for defining use cases, user-friendly workflows,  the overall system design, development of OGC standards-based code and testing. Farallon also prepared and loaded legacy cultural heritage data into the system along with integrating a semantic structure for describing the concepts and relationships used in cultural heritage documentation.

GCI and WMF had worked previously with Farallon to create the Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities ( MEGA), a Web-based inventory for archaeological sites in the Middle East, built using open source tools. 

Arches is an evolution of  innovative geospatial work designing and developing  MEGA and shares many of the same fundamental strengths including being: open source, standards-based, adaptable, multi-lingual and user-friendly for desktop, web and mobile workflows.