The design of a web-geographical information system: an experience in the integration of territorial reclamation support services

The design of a Web-geographical information system strongly requires methodological and operational tools to deal with information distributed in multiple, autonomous and heterogeneous data sources, and a uniform data publishing methodology and policy over Internet web sites. In this chapter, we describe our experience for the activities of requirement analysis and conceptual design of the DEAFIN Web-geographical information system whose objective is to improve the quality and the comparability of information about available industrial vacant sites, coming from different regional data sources. Heterogeneity and web availability requirements have been taken into account in the system architecture design. The DEAFIN system is thus conceived as a federated web-based information system, capable of managing and providing access to all the regional relevant information in an integrated and complete fashion. Furthermore, since the data available by a given DEAFIN region partner can be both spatial data and alphanumeric data, for each regional component system in the DEAFIN system, a Web-GIS system is defined.