As said above, the metadata collected has been introduced in the digital form in the File Maker 
Pro database. Such database, very useful at input stage, is limited in the query functionality. 
In our case each card refers to a single project and review all the data occurring in it. The 
limitation in the card is given by the number of themes (or data) which has been stated at 50. In the query 
function, asking a specific theme the database displays the whole card (one or many) containing the data 
as the reference element is the card not the theme. 
At present our database consists of 850 themes. It seems to be a sample large enough to test its 
functionality. 
4. THE RELATIONAL METADATA DATABASE 
The organization of data in a SQL Database was the evident solution to overcome limits 
identified in the File Maker database. At the same time, the development of virtual networks in terms of 
the improvement of the protocol standards always more and more effective, on the accessibility to even- 
kind of document and in terms of diffusion, suggested to take into account the possibility to make data 
available through Internet. 
On the basis of these two arguments, the direction undertaken by our Unit has been that to 
exploit the Internet and WWW facilities in order: 
- to make Venetian Lagoon metadata available to the largest number of users; 
- to inquire about those who have access to the Lagoon Database about their objective of the query, the 
aim being to 
obtain a general understanding on the studies and intervention practices involving the Lagoon planning 
and control; 
- having stated the most frequently asked questions and the most common paths of research, to design 
relational database in order to facilitate user's queries and interface it to WWW protocol. 
The metadata collected following the questionnaire form has organized the relational database 
tables according to the following scheme: 
- General Data , including data related to the project to which data refers and institution responsible for 
the project; 
- Characteristics, including the geographic coverage, the scale, nature of data (textual or image), type of 
image, if data is structured and spatially referenced; the source of data and the methodology of 
acquisition; 
- Themes, including the list of themes (or data) and their classification (nominal, discrete, continuous); 
finality (descriptive or management), spatial settlement (point, line, area); localization accuracy, 
measurement accuracy; 
- Time and quality assessment, including the date or frequency of data and methodology for quality- 
assessment; 
-Media, including data about media and informatic formats; 
- Availability and notes, including information about costs or modality- of agreements, etc. 
5. WEB-DATABASE ARCHITECTURE 
We decided to use the mSQL database, developed by David J. Hughes at the Bond University of 
Sidney (Australia) which presents some characteristics useful to our purpose to build a client-server 
architecture through Internet. 
The basic idea leading our work is to link an Hypertextual tool such as World Wide Web with 
the relational Database mSQL. 
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