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.
