International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol XXXV. Part B4. Istanbul 2004 
- the Geological Map of the Emilia-Romagna Apennines 
arca at the scale of 1:10000 digitally acquired as a raster 
files; 
- the data produced by the CARG project (the Italian 
Geological Surveying proget aimed to map the whole 
country at a scale of | :50000) stored in a vector GIS. 
Its well known that today the GIS technology is evolving 
beyond the traditional Geographic information system (GIS) 
technology and becoming an integral part of the information 
infrastructure in many organizations. To fully realize the 
capability and benefits of geographic information and GIS 
technology, spatial data needs to be shared and systems need to 
be interoperable. GIS technology provides the framework for a 
shared spatial data infrastructure and a distributed architecture. 
(ESRI, 2003a). The Open GIS Consortium (OGC) promotes 
interoperability in the field of geographical data trough the 
definition of standard interfaces and implementation guidelines. 
While it is strongly believed that the use of Web and OGC 
interoperable principles and standards are very important for the 
distribution and sharing of geological data, this paper doesn't 
consider a series of related topics as web cartography 
principles, generalisation procedures and algorithms, ISO 
guidelines and quality assessment procedures. 
The project has been managed following the standard stages for 
designing and implementation. of Geographical Information 
Systems (Harmon and Anderson, 2003). The following section 
cover the aspects of needs and requirement definition, the third 
describes the data and the fourth introduce the system 
architecture. It follows the description of the Web applications 
and interfaces and finally the conclusions are given. 
2. NEEDS AND REQUIREMENTS 
2.1 Users categories and needs 
The data must be distributed and shared between a large set of 
user groups. During the user need definition stage the users 
have been subdivided in two categories: internal and external 
users. 
The internal users are represented by all the staff of the region 
and partners that are supposed to make an advanced use of the 
data and to participate to an enterprise GIS structure that, 
through the management of the privileges, allows users to 
access, update and share the data. 
The external users are all the users data for a large set of 
purposes but maintaining. 
Internal users access to the enterprise GIS through of Internet in 
order to: 
- insert newly acquired data into the repository; 
- maintain the existing data; 
- use the data for decision making purposes; 
- administer the system. 
The external users need to access data published in order to 
perform their daily activities and decision making process. 
From this perspective the data are used for: 
- decision making process; 
- integration with other datasets; 
- evaluation of environmental parameters; 
- risk assessment procedures; 
- derivation of thematic maps; 
2.2 Data requirements 
Considering the high level of heterogeneity of the sets of data 
making up the repository (scale, accuracy, file format,...) and 
the large number of user accessing the data must be described 
accurately by the means of metadata. In order to accomplish the 
data sharing with the largest public as possible it has been 
decided to use ISO standard for geographical metadata. 
2.3 System requirements 
Considering the importance of data to be available and online 
for the major part of time the system should assure an high 
availability configuration. 
The system must be scalable and preferably portable. 
2.4 Software requirements 
The software should be as much as possible integrate with the 
previous GIS and Web applications made by the RER as well as 
respect the choices previously made by its IT Department. 
In consideration of the large and heterogeneous group of users 
the software should support as many platforms as possible and 
be vendors independent for the final users. The latter target has 
been achieved adopting the specification of the OGC 
consortium and implementing an OGC compliant interoperable 
interface on the top of the system. 
3. DATA AND METADATA 
It has been already said (see par. 1) that for this paper two 
datasets have been considered representative of the whole 
repository and then used for system prototyping. 
The Geological Map of the Emilia-Romagna Apennines area at 
the scale of 1:10000 is a map series made up of 151 sheet and it 
was available in a digital raster format. The raster data 
acquisition was carried out by the CGT during a former project 
aimed to distribute the maps through a series of 4 CDRoms . 
The CARG project is the official geo-thematic mapping italian 
project. It is aimed at the surveying of the whole Italian 
territory at the scale of 1:100000 and at the final production of a 
map series of more than 600 sheets at the scale of 1:50000 as 
well as of a Geographical Database where information layer are 
stored in vector format following a database rigid database 
scheme described in (Cara et al., 1993). 
The whole set of data, raster, vector, databases and services 
have been described by the means of metadata. Even if the 
Italian GIS community seem to have already taken his own way 
towards the adoption of the ISO standard for metadata 
definition (ISOTC211) the data have been described for both 
the ISO and FDCG standard. Moreover, in some cases, the 
standard structure of metadata have been extended to include 
into the description of the data a series of information not 
required for the standard but compulsory for the metadata 
requirements of these data made before the advent of the 
metadata standards. This is the case of the CARG project data 
which have their own metadata structure well described and 
adopted by the CARG community from the beginning of the 
project in the 1988. 
The modality of introduction of this information into the ISO 
metadata scheme, as well as the definition of the procedures to 
evaluate data quality parameters required in the 1SO 
specifications are among the main current issues in the CARG 
community, but they have not been taken into account in this 
paper. For more information see (Fantozzi et al., 2001). 
The metadata of the whole set of data, compiled accordingly to 
ISO specification, have been collected and stored as XML files 
in a central repository. 
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