Digital Silk Roads (DSR) project has been initiated by NII (National Institute of Informatics) since April 2001 in cooperation with UNESCO. The project aims to create a digital archive of cultural heritage in the Silk Roads region, and establish a network collaboration system by linking advanced information technology and cultural sciences.
A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between NII and UNESCO was signed in March 2003 by the Director Generals of UNESCO and NII.
Besides holding 2 international conferences on Digital Silk Roads in April 2001 in Tokyo and December 2003 at Nara, the DSR project Sub-Topics conducted at NII are as follows:

• Toyo Bunko “ Image and Manuscript Data”
• DSR Portal : ASPICO-DSR
• Bamiyan Virtual Museum
• Caravanserais of Silk Roads
• Dunhuang Field Research
• Silk Road Digital Map [1]

One of the above sub topics, caravanserais of Silk Roads is trying to use Information Technology as a framework for conducting systematic research on this subset of cultural assets remained from Silk Roads. This research is a kind of multidisciplinary work that should cover the architectural and historical information related to this typology of cultural heritage from one hand and the technologies and tools proper in Information Technology for a systematic analysis of related data from another hand.

The result can help with better scientific recognition of this architectural remain and further advanced distribution of its data over web for end-users.

[1] Ono, Kinji- Overview of the Digital Silk Roads Project, Summary and Future Perspectives- Proceeding of the Nara Symposium for Digital Silk Roads- Editor: Kinji Ono- pp. 63-70