CIPA 2003 XIX th International Symposium, 30 September - 04 October, 2003, Antalya, Turkey 
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We encourage the system administrators to locate all the system 
behind a firewall, as shown in fig. 1. It’s important, indeed, to 
protect all the data, cartographic and tabular as well, to 
discourage crackers to download any kind of sensible 
information. 
3.3 Functionalities 
The web site was built with Nuke technologies. Php-Nuke is a 
php-made application used to construct and manage via web 
portal systems. We decided to use it in the spirit of Open 
Source philosophy. The portal let the user read news about the 
“Marchesato di Saluzzo” Project, to take part in discussions, to 
download data and so on. Our aim was to build an interactive 
site for users interested in Cultural and Historical research. 
The first function implemented in our project was the 
possibility to navigate through the GIS application, fig.2. 
Mapserver enables the user to view and query the vector data. 
The first approach is to navigate on the cartography with user 
friendly panning and zooming procedures. 
Figure 2. Mapping Interface 
The user can also highlight different layers according to the 
scale of the view. Secondly, Mapserver lets you query the 
feature you want to analize simply by clicking on it (fig.2). This 
procedure query the dbf file associated with the shape vector 
file. In this step we decided to not use MySQL server for 
graphic queries because the MySQL support is still in beta 
version and it’s not very stable. 
The power of this system consists in the possibility to 
interrogate the MySQL server through a user friendly interface. 
It is possible to select the kind of feature (churches, cities, 
castles...) you want to have information about and the 
municipality where you want to focus your research (fig.4). 
Figure 3. Portal Home Page 
Figure 4. Query module: structure selection 
Figure 5. Query module: municipality selection