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The Department of Architecture in Oulu, the Laboratory of Architectural History has run since 1998 a research project called “The Change of Historic Towns: Historic Values, Identity and Control of Change in Finnish Urban Environment ”, which includes two historical subprojects: “Building of Oulu 1822 to1882” (Kovalainen, Vuojala), and “Building of Oulu 1882 – 1939” (arch. Kaarina Niskala) . The project has been financed by the Academy of Finland.
The objective of the research is to reconstruct and understand the development of the town from agricultural era till industrialism. The town has been devastated by two great fires, in 1822 and 1882. The visual documentation of the town prior the fire of 1882 is limited and poor. Therefore the focus of research has been, besides the “normal” qualitative archive material, on vast quantitative evidence, which is preserved in the fire insurance documents of Tarmo Company (est. 1832 as “Finland´s General Fire-Aid Company”).
The documentation of building stock of insurances covers major parts of the town, and consists of essential facts like building measurements, materials, constructions, building years, which enables to reconstruct some of the buildings even up to minor details. As first step, all information from 
altogether 1010 fire insurance documents of Oulu is being analyzed, organized and collected into a digital database (500 000 records), which provides information of 3683 single buildings. This rare material has been published in form of an easy-to-use CD-disc, where it is divided in three parts, each of them functioning as menus. The register includes information on the insurance number, location of the building, owners and values of the property. The building catalogue has information on each building, like on their functions, ages, length and width. The scanned lot maps are divided according the numeral order of the town parts.
The Time Machine Oulu (arch. Jaakko Peltonen) is an independent project, which exploits the same fire insurance database. It is experimental multilevel 3D database system exploring and visualizing the town history. The system provides interface for user to visually and interactively explore the virtual model of the town and cultural urban data. Virtual 3D model can reveal us forgotten and unknown features about the city. The material can be examined as well in 3D or text format or their combination. Researcher can be exempted from the location so that reference material can be added with PDA system and sent to database using variety of network techniques. Research data can on the other hand be viewed with any Internet connection including portable wireless computers.
The system can also be implemented on different cities and regions after short software implementation to collected building and topographic data. It can also provide Internet portal for all kinds of cultural material happened in the location. Intention is to define software object model for Cultural events and sites. Databases enables to store data in general form and data becomes cumulative and selfrefining. A single high quality can be used for storage of all events in location. The 3D models give us a user interface not experienced before, but again it is natural for urban artifacts and events.
The system uses client-server technique, which divides the data warehousing and handling in server side and 3D renderings for the client side using general internet tools. Basic requirement for client is vrml capable www-browser, which are distributed free by various vendors. Server side implementation is accomplished using general tools also and is platform independent.
