AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL WEB GIS APPLICATION BASED ON MAPSERVER AND POSTGIS

The availability of cultural heritage information of a territory can lead to an improvement in its exploitation and preservation and to a greater fruition by the community. To this aim, a web GIS of Spina Verde a natural and archaeological park in the northern part of Italy has been designed and implemented. The main topic has been to create a tool easy to access and suitable both for domain experts, such as archaeologists or museums, and laypersons interested in the cultural assets of the area for educational or tourist purposes. Territorial and environmental information has been organised in two different parts, in order to provide a complete and exhaustive frame where the archaeological entities are located. The first one allows the analysis of the environmental aspects of the area, providing five groups of thematic maps; the second one deals with the study of the archaeological features, giving their position and their main characteristics. Data sources are both digital data (existing and in-situ acquired) and non digital. All data have been processed and loaded in the system as vector files, raster file and PostgreSQL DBMS tables. The whole system lives in a common web site, implemented in HTML language and exploiting MapServer for GIS functionalities and PostGIS for its connection with the PostgreSQL database. The improved functions are map browsing, single and multiple queries and archaeological features thematic views.