CIP A 2005 XX International Symposium. 26 September - 01 October. 2005, Torino, Italy, 
608 
2. WEBSITE AND SOFTWARE SYSTEM 
2.1 The open source tools 
In the wide software scenario of OpenSource solutions, we 
selected the applications that had to fundamentally solve three 
problems: 
1. Web presentation 
2. Map and data management 
3. Powerful Search Engine 
There are plenty solutions available on Internet, but we chose 
the most diffused and stable ones in a way to be always up to 
date and to reach best performances. 
As Web Server was selected Apache Server 
(http://httpd.apache.org) that is the most used and powerful on 
Internet network. As indicated in the official Website, the 
Apache Project is a collaborative software development effort 
aimed at creating a robust, commercial-grade, featureful, and 
freely-available source code implementation of an HTTP (Web) 
server. 
The site is based on Java technologies; Apache Jakarta Tomcat 
(http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat) and the Application Server 
Jhoss (http://www.jboss.org) have been used to manage Java 
code and pages. The Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) is a 
multitiered architecture for implementing enterprise-class 
applications and web based applications. This technology 
supports a variety of application types from large scale Web 
applications to small client server applications. The main aim of 
J2EE technology is to create a simple development model for 
enterprise applications using component based application 
model. In this model such components use services provided by 
the container, which would otherwise typically need to be 
incorporated in application code. J2EE applications are made up 
of different components. A J2EE component is a self-contained 
functional software unit that is assembled into a J2EE 
application with its helper classes and files and that 
communicates with other components in the application. The 
J2EE specification defines the following J2EE components: 
• Application clients and applets are components that 
run on the client. 
• Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technology 
components are Web components that run on the web 
server. 
• Enterprise JavaBeans components (enterprise beans) 
are business components that run on the application 
server. 
The servlet container selected for the project is Jakarta Tomcat 
that is used in the official Reference Implementation for the 
Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. Jboss was 
selected as Application Server and it is the application server 
that implements the complete Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 
stack, including Java Server Pages (JSP), servlets, and 
Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB). 
MapServer (http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu), which is an Open 
Source development environment for building Web mapping 
applications, was the adopted solution to manage the 
cartographic system. In MapServer it is possible, through a 
CGI-based application, to deliver on-line, interactive GIS and 
image processing information quickly and reliably. This system 
description will be deepened in Section 0 below. 
It was decided to adopt an XML description of documents based 
on the SDX system to optimize the search engine. SDX (System 
for Documents in XML) is an Open Source software which 
allows to retrieve and display XML documents. This Java 
platform is implemented on a servlet engine, either after 
compilation or as a deployable Web application. 
Finally, the heart of the system, the DataBase, is the Postgres 
SQL Server (http://www.postgresql.org) that, as written in his 
official website, is a highly scalable, SQL compliant, open 
source object-relational database management system. With 
more than 15 years of development history, it is quickly 
becoming the de facto database for enterprise level open source 
solutions. 
2.2 System architecture 
Figure 1. System Architecture 
The system architecture has the classical structure of a dynamic 
system, where are integrated public accesses for users Web 
pages navigation and protected access to allow administrators 
and operators to manage the data contained in the system. 
As indicated in Figure 1 the Java Engine is shared by different 
accesses and is the interface with the DataBase. 
Besides administrative operations, the site must be updated by 
researchers of different disciplines, to allow input and editing of 
the information and data contained in the system. This access is 
also protected by password and each researcher will have his 
dedicated password, to monitor activities and to associate data 
to researcher or association that input them to system, protecting 
their property. 
Analyzing the system more in detail, it can be described as in 
Figure 2, where are indicated the logical connection between 
different software components 
Figure 2. Software System 
From DataBase, the data are extracted to be showed in the two 
main methods: the cartographic visualization and the card