Land Cover and Soil Consumption Monitoring with a FOS Geoportal in Five Italian Big Urban Areas

This work is framed within Urban GEO BIG DATA, a project of national interest funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research aimed to set up methodologies to investigate and manage urban areas benefiting of available Geo Big Data and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Five Italian cities (Turin, Milan, Padua, Rome, and Naples) are examined with respect to: 1) urban mobility; 2) land cover and soil consumption at different resolutions; 3) displacement time series. Here we focus on the main outcome of the project, that is the implementation of a collaborative Free and Open Source (FOS) distributed and acentric interoperable geospatial data infrastructure consisting of several components, with respect to land cover and soil consumption. Main features and possible user applications of this platform are illustrated, in the light of the most recent available data.