Geoportals Evaluation. Italian Regions: A Case Study

Abstract

Abstract. This paper presents the state of the art of the geoportals of Italian regions at the end of the year 2007. The report tackles a topic that arose a lot of discussions and is still in the heart of GIS debate: the methods and criteria for evaluating a Spatial Data Infrastructure. The difficulties on evaluating an SDI comes obviously from the complex nature of the matter to examine (de Man, 2006) and reflects its multifaceted, dynamic essence and the involvement of many stakeholder in the process of building and running an SDI. The necessity of evaluating an SDI, which represents most of the time a capital investments that wants to receive a feedback not only in an economic sense but also in a social and technical sense, is worthing more than ever. The research, considering the importance and the impact of the INSPIRE Directive on National Spatial Data Infrastructure, intended to investigate the actual conditions of the 20 Italian regions, that are the bricks of the wall of the Italian SDI. Because of the plenty of geodata handled by regions, has been studied how these data are managed in each regional geoportal and presented to external users for further utilization and processing; the interface of the geoportals has been studied as an important factor to be considered in the approach of a common user. It has also been studied the degree of implementation of services and functionalities offered to the user. The research had to face the comparison with local, national and international laws and experiences, the technical problems due to difficulties on finding data on the web, the problem of presenting a complex situation in a perceptible way. By the use of few parameters, we could trace a quite honest picture of the actual state of play of Italian regional geoportals. Despite all the improvements the regions have done, the current situation of distributed Geoinformation sharing is not so positive, and among a lot of attempts, only few regions have embryonic SDI in place.

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