Operationalizing the Historic Urban Landscape Framework Through Heritage-Sensitive Urban Data Platforms: A Blueprint from Spa Settlements

Urban data platforms increasingly support heritage documentation, analysis, and management, yet their integration with the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) framework remains fragmented, particularly in translating complex morphological and heritage knowledge into operational digital structures. This study develops a heritage-sensitive urban data platform blueprint that translates the six-step HUL implementation framework into a structured digital knowledge system and examines it through the SPATTERN heritage-sensitive urban data platform. Using 38 Serbian spa settlements as an observatory case, the research adopts a sequential knowledge-translation methodology combining methodological and empirical investigation, typomorphological analysis, expert consultation, digital knowledge modelling, and an implementation-oriented schema crosswalk. The SPATTERN blueprint organizes heterogeneous heritage knowledge through analytical dimensions, urban patterns and archetypes, user requirements, datasets, and functional modules, establishing traceable relationships between analytical interpretation and platform architecture. The HUL–SPATTERN crosswalk demonstrates correspondence across conceptual, informational, and functional levels, to differing degrees across the six implementation steps, identifies gaps in consensus-building, vulnerability assessment and local management, and shows that heritage objectives can be largely maintained throughout the transition from knowledge production to digital implementation. The study establishes a reproducible methodological roadmap for developing heritage-sensitive urban data platforms in which digital infrastructure is derived from explicit heritage knowledge requirements rather than predetermined technological capabilities. It positions knowledge translation as the critical interface between morphological interpretation, heritage values, and operational digital environments.