CIPA 2003 XIX 11 ' International Symposium, 30 September - 04 October, 2003, Antalya, Turkey 
M.U.R.S.T. (Ministry of University, Scientific Research and 
Technology), which has the goal of creating an instrument not 
only for historical and archaeological research but also for the 
conservation and the valorization of the Valle Po 3 landscape 
and property, which was built built to be used by researchers, 
local administrators that have to preserve local cultural heritage, 
and the common person who wants the land for tourism. 
In the last three years a lot of data coming from different fields 
such as archeology, geology, botany, and cultural antropology, 
have been collected by experts in different and specific fields, 
and organized in a database. It is then integrated into a 
geographic information system by a team from Turin 
Polithecnic Department, in cooperation with “Marcovaldo” 
cultural association. The birth of a stand alone GIS permitted us 
to put together, to compare and to interpret archive data, 
material data and data from aerial photography interpretation. 
We believe, in fact, that interdisciplinarity is necessary to 
understand land transformations and the human role. 
After this first step, the next is publishing the GIS on the 
Internet, a web-site sharing the project and final tool of it. 
3.1 Aim of the publication 
The aim is to create a portal, a web site able to give visibility of 
the whole project and that is able to offer different 
functionalities to users. The web-site is thought of and designed 
for two kinds of users. The first person has the need of using 
this tool as part of his work, in the decision making process, or 
in a research action. He has to use all information available, and 
could have the need of adding data from developing work. The 
second person is a user who wants an easy to easy-to-use 
instrument to discover and get a wide vision of the land of 
Marchesato di Saluzzo. 
We designed the portal considering it was made by different 
parts: first of all we want to give users a complete idea of the 
whole project, let them understand its complexity, and 
appreciate the research and synthesis effort. We want to offer 
them the chance to know why the project was started, how it 
was developed, who worked in it, who supported it and how it 
was carried out. So we arranged information, including the 
articles written by researchers from different fields, many of 
which have been presented at sectorial congresses, and where 
users can express their own ideas, or send them to the 
administrators’ team, who may decide to publish them. 
We believe a map is the easiest way to let users discover the 
land in an simple and personal way.. We built a section where 
users can interact with a map, having the chance to get simple 
pan/zoom functionalities and choose what kind of information 
layer they want to see. If they like, they can query the map, 
getting information about the object they want. We also 
developed also a tool to let users center the map on the area of a 
municipality, chosen from a list that is dynamically generated 
from the database, of all the municipalities of the Marchesato 
area. The user interface is conceived to be simple and easy to 
use. 
If users want to get more detailed information about particular 
structures in a specific zone, they can use the tools implemented 
in the query part of the website: here users are asked to choose 
3 Valle Po is one of the main valley in Marchesato di Saluzzo, 
an area in the south of the Piedmont region, in the north 
west of Italy. In the Middle Ages it knew a period of 
prosperity, before getting under the power of the Savoy 
royal family. 
the option they want from a list which is dynamically generated 
from the database. We would like to underline that such 
solution, prevents the user from selecting an unavailable option. 
It also solves the problem of having to manage text strings 
introduced by the user. We wanted to make it possible to link 
MYSQL database with the mapping application and we worked 
so that the user has the chance to see on the map the structure 
he has found with a query tool: after finding a structure by 
chosing different options like the ones we described before, the 
users can see their selection enhanced on the map, and then they 
can continue using the mapping tool as usual. While working, 
researchers need to access the, to modify them with the results 
of their speculations, and to make multicriterial analysis using 
the whole content of the database. This is why the website 
offers the chance to access a restricted area, where authorized 
people can remotely manage the database itself 
3.2 The structure 
As you can see in fig. 1 the “Marchesato di Saluzzo” project is 
basically based on a Mapserver machine, where the Mapserver 
GIS engine runs with a database Mysql server to store and 
consult the data. Connections between Mapserver and MySQL 
data use PHP scripting language. PHP is an HTML-embedded 
scripting language. 
Figure 1. Structure layout 
Much of its syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a 
couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in. The goal of 
the language is to allow web developers to write dynamically 
generated pages quickly. 
All the system is built on a Debian GNU/Linux server. The 
Apache httpd server enable the connections between the clients 
and the server. Apache is a powerful, flexible, HTTP/1.1 
compliant web server, implements the latest protocols, 
including HTTP/1.1 (RFC2616), is highly configurable and 
extensible with third-party modules, can be customised by 
writing 'modules' using the Apache module API, provides full 
source code and comes with an unrestrictive license. Runs on 
Windows NT/9x, Netware 5.x and above, OS/2, and most 
versions of Unix, as well as several other operating systems, is 
actively being developed, encourages user feedback through 
new ideas, bug reports and patches.