May 17

Contents

Editor's Introduction

I have been in Italy for the past two weeks, visiting family and friends, so I took the opportunity to catch up with GIS developments here. In this week's issue, I bring you a wide-ranging discussion with a faculty member at the Politecnico di Milano, Milan's prestigious science and technology university. Plus, the usual round-up of press releases.

As always, I encourage your feedback.

Ciao!

— Matteo Luccio

GIS in Italy

Introduction

While GPS-based car navigation systems are ever more popular in Italy as they are throughout Europe, the country lags behind many countries on the continent in the development of GIS and GIS training. However, this is beginning to change due to several initiatives in Northern Italy and at the national level.

I discussed the development in Italy of GIS (also known here as "sistemi informativi territoriali," or SIT) with Professor Franco Guzzetti at the Department of Hydraulic, Environmental, Infrastructure, and Data Collection Engineering (Dipartimento di Ingegneria Idraulica, Ambientale, Infrastrutture Varie, Rilevamento —D.I.I.A.R.) of the Architecture Faculty of the Politecnico di Milano, Milan's famous engineering school. Everything that follows is based on what he told me—and any errors are most likely due to my transcription, translation, and editing of the interview.

Guzzetti, a civil engineer specializing in transportation and cartography, received a PhD in geodetic sciences at the Politecnico, then was hired as a researcher there and began teaching topography and photogrammetry, becoming an associate professor five years ago. In his parallel activity as a consultant, in 1999 he began dealing with, first, cartography, then, increasingly, the utilization of the cartographic base for GIS. Now he deals mostly with GIS, as opposed to cartography.

The Public & Private Sectors

The most important current GIS development in Italy is an agreement between the national, regional, and local governments ("Intesa Stato-Regioni-Enti Locali per la realizzazzione dei sistemi informativi geografici" or "Intesa GIS" for short), which has been developing technical specifications—including some aimed at the unification of cartographic production and opening GIS toward various methods of data capture. This work, in which Guzzetti has been heavily involved, led to the issuing, a couple of years ago, of national directives, which regional governments are now beginning to implement.

Lombardia and Trentino Alto Adige, two northern regions in which Guzzetti does a lot of work, are a little ahead of other regions. Two years ago, Lombardia enacted a new regional law that mandates that local governments use GIS to exchange land use data. In particular, they must develop their "cartographic support" using the national standards developed by Intesa GIS, transitioning from the old cartography to topographic databases that are suitable for GIS. They must also use GIS for all urban planning to, among other things, convey information between local governments and the regional government.

In 2001, Italy launched a national road database project. It was seen initially as a surveying challenge; however, in reading the law and understanding its intent, it becomes clear that the issue is one of setting up a road GIS to collect in a single place data on, for example, accidents, road geometry, and noise propagation modeling. The national government funded this activity but devolved responsibility for implementation to regions and provinces—which, however, have nearly none of the required expertise. Often, not understanding its full potential, local and regional governments begin a surveying phase, which then dies in a drawer or on a video.

There are also many European directives with regards to both the GIS content and format. The Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE), an international organization, has been a leader in this effort. Unfortunately, Italy often lacks official representation at these meetings and those who attend usually do so in their in individual capacity.

In Italy, the use of open source software lags far behind that in other countries where national agencies often use it to manage some or all of their data. The Trentino-Alto Adige region—in part because of its cultural ties with Austria and Germany—has agencies that are setting national standards in the use of open source software. In Bolzano, for example, a course on open source is taking place this week, taught by a German group and attended by the province of Bolzano, the cadastral office for the province, a consortium of local governments in the region, and other local agencies. These things are absent elsewhere in Italy, even though there are already directives specifying that a certain percentage of the software used by local governments must be open source and a large share of IT resources goes toward the purchase and maintenance of software.

Most local governments and agencies use ESRI software; the Politecnico, in particular, has historically used ESRI products, helped by ESRI educational discounts. Last year, professors Guzzetti, Paolillo, and Pelagatti began an effort to make open source software available in Politecnico classrooms. Intergaph software is also used a bit; Autodesk less, though use of the new MapGuide is now growing now, but not at the Politecnico.

In Italy, data gathering is all done by private companies, and public agencies manage the databases. For example, when a public agency needs a survey of roads or a new cadastre system, it invites private vendors to submit bids, within a given budget, and then, depending on the project, it verifies the data during and/or at the end of the project. There is no exchange of data between public agencies and private companies, and data integration is rather difficult.

The impetus given to GIS in Italy by Intesa GIS is helping people to understand that geographic data may come from different sources and platforms, but must reside in a single database and must be accessible by all intended users. In Italy the main perspective is still cartographic: for example, the Military Geographic Institute creates maps at scales 25,000:1 and below; regional governments produce maps of their territory at scales of 5,000:1 to 10,000:1; city governments need maps at 2,000:1 scale and the cadastre office manages maps at 1,000:1 scale. So, the same area is surveyed by four or five agencies at different times and in different ways, and with data that then don't match.

Until the advent of GIS, this was not a big problem, because each agency gathered and maintained a certain level of information. Now that information travels vertically, however, this arrangement is no longer tenable and problems arise. One of the basic tenets of INSPIRE, and even more so of Intesa GIS, is that data must be gathered only once, in the most convenient, direct, and immediate way possible, and where it can best be kept up to date. This premise is now radically changing, though slowly, the way of maintaining geographic information in Italy.

Currently, only the Lombardia region is activating a process of this kind: the national government funds local, provincial, and regional governments, as well as national agencies, to gather and maintain geographic data, depending on which is best able to do so. Each one of these agencies manages a database and makes the data available for free.

Private mapping companies, such as Navteq, don't bother acquiring data from the cadastre, because it is useless to them. They either negotiate barter agreements with city governments, especially in the case of the larger cities, whereby the city provides its data to the private company and the latter then provides updates to the city. Alternatively, they gather their own data, using standard algorithms to distribute street numbers along blocks. Requirements for new maps now almost always include georeferencing of street centerlines and house numbers. It is rare, however, for private companies to acquire data from city governments—whose databases, by the way, are often dirty and don't follow national standards. All of these problems, inevitably, come to the surface when one tries to set up a GIS, which simply cannot function if the data don't follow standards.

The hope is that setting up GISs will produce a good return on investment (ROI) for local governments—such as, in the short-term, increasing data access speed and better service to the public and, in the long-term, cost savings. In Italy there is a long tradition of the parties in power to court voters by delivering services shortly before elections. They used to, for example, pave roads; the equivalent today, often, is a Web-based city GIS.

There have been many incentives, delegated down the line from the national government to regional, provincial, and city governments, for the creation of the infrastructure—such as wireless Internet access in mountain villages and intranets connecting public agencies—but little for the education and training of staff. The result is that, for example, one consortium of 44 cities and towns in Piemonte has a very high speed wireless network and a customized application linking all of them, but the staff still uses the old application because nobody trained them in the use of the new one, they don't see any short-term benefits, and nobody penalizes them for not using the new system.

In this regards, too, the Lombardia region is leading the way. Last year, it launched a program to match any funds provided by local governments to produce topographic data. It provides that, for the development of base maps—which require street centerlines, hydrographic data, georeferenced street numbers, surveys of city boundaries, etc.—the data must be consistent and topologically correct for the whole region. Guzzetti did the technical project. The regional politicians were skeptical that their local counterparts would want to put money toward this; last year, however, of 1,600 municipalities in Lombardia, more than 500 applied for matching funds; now in the second year of the project, the region is trying to double the funding, because it is forecasting that 80 to 90 percent of the municipalities will apply. So, the demand for GIS is no longer just latent; however, there is little ability to prioritize tasks in such a way as to start having an ROI in the first year.

Guzzetti gave me three examples, all in Milan, of inefficiencies and redundancies in the current system that a GIS would correct:

• The city has about 150,000 water drains on public roads, parks, etc.; instead of mapping them using GPS, the city numbered them by soldering a small metal plate to each one, at a total cost of about $607,000. Likewise, it has numbered trees with small labels—without bar code or RFID.
• The city's GIS office, the independent agency that collects trash and cleans the streets, and the one that manages public transportation, each fly yearly photogrammetry to cover the exact same area. The same private company flies all three, but according to three different technical specifications.
• The city's parks department has staff whose sole task is to walk around and report facilities and equipment in need of maintenance or repairs; they file their reports through an IT system, but not a GIS, so they are not georeferenced. So, the maintenance teams that respond to these reports have to search for the facilities or equipment in question.

Like elsewhere, engineers in Italy have a strong CAD tradition. Intesa GIS is now strongly promoting the notion that CAD is not suited for GIS purposes. In developing national GIS standards, it reviewed laws and regulations concerning the management of roads, urban planning, land use, water pollution, etc., so as to ensure that new GIS will be have all the attributes and feature classes that public agencies will need to meet those legal mandates. For now, however, many in Italy see the conversion from CAD to GIS as too costly.

It is very rare to find a proprietary GIS product that has an Italian national frame of reference. The country has now decided to transition to UTM WGS84 for cartography; only the Alto Adige region has actually transitioned its databases; the Lombardia region is thinking about it. However, everybody still works in the Gauss-Boaga projection with a very particular ellipsoid. If you take any international software and look for it, you will not find it. You will find Sardinia, because the U.S. government had an interest in that island for many years due to its mines and so it developed a regional geodetic reference frame which is implemented in GIS. Otherwise, you have to manually input all the proper settings in your GIS. Culturally, this is a problem. Italy straddles UTM 32N and UTM 33N; a few years ago, a proposal was developed for a system that would allow the country to use a single UTM zone. The biggest problems are for a few regions, such as Veneto, that straddle the zones.

The Role of the Cadastre

Italy is now just beginning to think in terms of lots and streets as the basic geographic units. However, in Italy, the cadastre is not responsible for maintaining legally binding boundaries. Cadastral maps here have never been surveys and don't contain measurements; rather, they only serve to identify the owner of each lot. What is legally binding is the description of the lot, and of any buildings on it, contained in the ownership title. The cadastre office keeps these title documents on file, but does not independently verify them, let alone certify them. In this sense, the Italian cadastre is anomalous; keep in mind, though, that it is one of the oldest in the world.

In 1988, however, the cadastre office was the first Italian agency to begin to think about the constant and progressive updating of its data. Cartography was updated via aerial photogrammetry every several years (for example, in 1988, 1996, and 2004), without the possibility of continuous updates, and parallel databases were, therefore, disconnected from geographic bases and often in conflict. The cadastre set up a process so that the owner of each parcel, whenever data changes, must follow a procedure, which serves to update and quantify the cadastre's database.

The Italian cadastre, however, has never wanted to take the next step—that is, to say that its geographic data should be the foundation for that of all other agencies. The cadastre approved the agreements and standards developed by Intesa GIS, but did little to implement them. For example, there are still many regions of Italy where the cadastre has its own, local reference system rather than the national one.

In Italy there is no single database of all administrative boundaries. The law says that the border is whatever the cadastre says it is; however, the cadastre, on its maps, does not have surveying data, because it does not want to say where anything is except in reference to the surrounding parcels. So, in order to accurately locate anything, you have to first look at the cadastral map, interpret it (for example: a municipal boundary might follow the side of a soccer field), then use another map to figure out the coordinates or go to the location and survey it. The cadastre does not store the sequence of coordinates that define the borders. Of course, the moment you start to set up a GIS this problem comes to the surface. So you end up with land that is claimed by two municipalities and land that is claimed by none—which is a disaster for a GIS.

Education & Training

Recent national and regional laws mandating the use of GIS have greatly increased the demand for GIS training and led Guzzetti and another faculty member at the Politecnico, Pier Luigi Paolillo, to begin teaching a course on GIS and land use management. A few other Italian universities, among them the one in Venice, offer courses in GIS; however, they have focused mostly on the theory of information systems—not basic training. There is no school in Italy that teaches architects, surveyors, and engineers how to exchange, verify, and query geographic information via GIS so as to make it a key element in planning.

Nationwide, many of Guzzetti's colleagues in topography and cartography work with GIS, but their work is not very institutionalized. The Politecnico has several courses with "GIS" in the name; its sister institution in Turin has a well-known geomatics laboratory; and Professor Galetto has for many years included a section on GIS in his topography and photogrammetry courses at the University of Pavia. The problem, however, is that these classes are taught only in the context of programs for engineers or architects and are often optional. Unlike other European countries, such as Austria, Switzerland, and Germany, Italy has no complete GIS program anywhere.

Given the lack of GIS training programs, for the past several years Guzzetti and various colleagues have been hired as consultants by local and regional governments, which need assistance in setting up their own GISs.

The fact that GIS is taught in the architecture and engineering departments is a problem; a much greater percentage of the geology students who take GIS courses then use GIS in the course of their professional work. Few students undertake to study engineering or architecture knowing that GIS should be an important component of their professional training. Therefore, they don't focus much on it. The courses are not very developed.

GIS courses are more developed and successful when aimed at mid-career professionals in public administration. It is part of a more general problem: in elementary schools in Italy, for example, geography is taught very little. On the other hand, it is common for a mayor to see Google Earth and tell city staff: "I want an application just like that one,that shows my town in detail, by next week."

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