Digital cartographic heritage in service to the society: Landscape analysis for informed decision making

The paper describes the results of the project “Atl@nte dei Catasti Storici e delle carte Topografiche della Lombardia” (Atlas of historical cadastre and topographic maps of Lombardy) and in particular the potentials of an open source platform for cartographic heritage, developed as one of the main deliverables. The value of this research is of twofold nature. On one hand side, it regards cartography as heritage addressed not only to experts but to society and general public, as argued by International Working Group on “Digital Technologies in Cartographic Heritage”: the project queries methodologies for systematic information structure, geo-referencing and representation of historic maps given their artistic-historic as well as technical-cartographic nature. On the other side, the research investigates how innovative geo-portal tools could be used to promote a progressive use of historic maps during territorial planning processes. The analysis of landscape transformations rely increasingly upon integrated services based on geospatial information, creating a progressive demand of data sets and service and aiming at an extensive availability of these information to different final users. To this purpose, it is necessary to consider different domains of technological progress but also an appropriate territorial dimension, applying a multi-scale approach in an SDI framework. Geo-referenced maps of Atl@nte at territorial-regional and cadastral-local scale could be further integrated with data such as satellite, multi-spectral airborne and in-situ UAV images, to address actions on built environment and to provide new scenarios for retrieving geospatial knowledge of territory and its multiple layers of history.