Emanuela Cova
Provincia di Bologna, Via Zamboni 8, 40126 Bologna, tel (+39) 051218812, fax (+39) 051218810, manu@metro.provincia.bologna.it

Abstract

The Province of Bologna is a local authority whose extension covers an area of about 3300 Kmq, inhabited by one million people. Its main duty concerns land programming and urban planning. Since 1987, the Province has been creating and maintaining its own GIS data sets, aimed to describing the whole provincial territory and the urban and territorial plans. Furthermore, instruments for consultation and elaboration have been acquired based on ArcInfo GIS.

For internal use purposes and then as a tool for the description of GIS data for sale, a metadata application has been implemented, following the European directives based on CEN/TC287.

Recently, new telematic technologies have been developed in order to improve communication and data exchange between the Province and other local authorities, such as Municipalities.

Lastly an agreement with Cadastral offices has been signed, allowing the Province to manage the overall cadastral geographical data set.

By considering all these aspects and the high availability of geographical information, the Province of Bologna has been involved into the EU Research Project Commuter, aimed at developing software and methods to support update and integration of GIS data and transactions that can be executed by remote distributed databases. Significant tests on new geographical cadastral data updating procedures will be led, based upon spread interfaces and integration between cadastral and territorial geographical data sets.

This paper describes the main characteristics of the Province of Bologna activities in GIS sector, focusing on Commuter Project with particular reference to the Italian prototype.

1. INTRODUCTION TO THE PROVINCE OF BOLOGNA AND ITS ACTIVITIES

The Province of Bologna is a local authority, which administers an area of about 350.000 hectares and it is inhabited by one million people approximately. It is one of the nine Provinces of the Emilia-Romagna Region. The Province is articulated into Sectors, Services and Offices. The Land Planning Sector is directly involved into the Commuter Project and represents one of the main activity areas of the Province.

The provincial territory is administered locally by sixty Municipalities, first of them Bologna, which differ greatly in extension and number of inhabitants. The Province is responsible for the government of the whole territory and co-ordinates the municipal activities.

The main duties of the Province, with particular reference to the above mentioned area, are land programming and planning, environment, water and soil control and protection. Besides it is responsible for further functions concerning master plans control in order to verify the congruence with the general territorial planning. According to recent legislation, the Province co-ordinates also the activities of data collecting and processing of other local authorities, such as Municipalities, Mountain Communities, Consortia, etc.

2. PROVINCE'S GIS AND DATA SET DESCRIPTION

2.1 INTRODUCTION OF GIS INTO THE organisation

The activity of the Land Planning Sector concerning territorial information systems begun in 1987 and grew up thanks to some important laws which contributed to define the role of the Province in the design and the management of GIS: L.R. 30/1988 (designing of the Emilia-Romagna Region's Information System), L. 142/1990 (reform of local authorities), L.R. 6/1995 (rules concerning territorial programming and planning).

The Land Planning Sector has its own data transmission network dedicated to the Territorial Information System (SIT) for planning purposes. The available data have been acquired by Emilia-Romagna Region or thanks to agreements with other Institutions such as the Municipality of Bologna, ATC (Public Transport), SEABO (Energy and Environment).

A strongest incentive to the development of the provincial SIT is due also to administrative aims: thanks to information technologies the urban master plans control has been facilitated. Furthermore, urban master plans and cadastral data form a fundamental data set at a municipal level and their computerisation leads to simplify many administrative procedures.

2.2 GIS HW AND SW INFRASTRUCTURE

By considering also the metropolitan offices, the provincial SIT (fig. 1) is formed by four UNIX Sun servers and seven ArcInfo licences, by two NT servers for the management of Intranet/Internet services, by fifteen clients and about ten ArcView licences for GIS data consultation, by two A0 digitizers, two A0 ink-jet plotters, three networking laser printers and three networking colour ink-jet printers. At the moment, the metropolitan offices are connected by means of a 2 Mbps radio-bridge.

Figure 1

Scheme of the provincial SIT

2.3 DATA SETS

The Province and, in particular, the Land Planning Sector manages a number of geo-related data. The most important layers, covering the whole provincial territory and acquired at a scale among 1:25000 and 1:5000, are: administrative boundaries, settlement boundaries, water flows, rivers' respect zones, lakes, water basins, alluvial terraces, roads and railways (fig. 2), drain networks, high-voltage electric lines, census tracts, regional landscape plan, some tables of PTI (the provincial master plan), dumps, municipal master plan zones, real land use, raster topographic maps of the province (scale 1: 5000 and 1:25000 at a resolution of 800, 400, 200 dot per inch).

Figure 2

Roads and railways on a raster base (scale 1:25000)

2.4 METADATA

In order to archive and easily retrieve all the information about the geo-data, the Province began to store them into a structured meta-database. The CEN/TC287 European standard has been chosen, in order to be as much as possible open and compliant towards the emerging standards.

Figure 3 shows the main window of the developed meta-database showing the general description of the transport infrastructure dataset, containing information about roads and railways of the provincial territory. This input mask allows to enter other important sections, such as the quality of the dataset, the reference system used during the acquisition and the extended description of the spatial objects. All these information allow users to have a general and complete overview of data they are interested in. The contents of the meta database will be organised in an Oracle DB, in order to obtain a more efficient and shared consultation.

Figure 3

This figure shows the main input mask of the meta-database.
It concerns the general description of the road and railway system of the Province of Bologna.

3. GIS-RELATED PROJECT

3.1 AN IMPORTANT AGREEMENT FOR ACQUIRING CARTOGRAPHY

In 1995 an agreement between the Region, Municipality and Province of Bologna, ATC and SEABO has been signed, which aims at creating, maintaining and enlarging a cartographic database for the management of any initiative related to the territory. During 1997 also COSEA (Consortium of services) signed the agreement.

The main purpose of this agreement is the creation of cartographic instruments for a shared GIS on the provincial territory and for the definition of methods and rules for exchanging data.

Following the guidelines of the agreement, cartography will be available also to private and public users. The access to the informative data bases and the sale methods will be defined following national and community's rules.

3.2 ACHIEVED RESULTS

A numeric cartography (scale 1:5000) has been realised, based on the regional technical cartography derived by aero-photogrammetric techniques, which represents one intermediate instrument able to satisfy the different requirements: the computerisation of this cartographic base (raster format) forms a fundamental working instrument for the present activity and also for the next acquisitions. Another cartography has been also realised (scale 1:25000) for representations at a lower detail.

The second task has been the completion of the road network model of the whole provincial territory: the first release has been produced by the Region and the Province by means of the acquisition of the road axes in vector format starting from the raster base (scale 1:5000) and the integration of the information collected by the toponomastic census.

In particular this instrument allows to manage and localise networks and technological systems for managing the distribution of water and gas, trash collecting points, bus stops and routes, maintenance operations of public infrastructures, business and productive activities, information on the population, local fiscality.

The operative program is to be defined, related to the future activity and to the economic plan for the next three years due to the renewal of the agreement. The first step will be the acquisition of the civic numbers of the whole provincial territory: in this way, every object referred to an address will be easily retrieved.

The costs of the projects have been subdivided between the partners according to their interest and to their involvement. The raster cartography (scale 1:5000) cost 170 million ITL; the acquisition of the graphical road network cost 180 million ITL.

3.2 TAMTEL

In order to improve the communication inside the Public Administration, the Province planned to create a telematic infrastructure in order to be connected to the 60 municipalities forming the provincial territory.

Instruments for telecommunication will be purchased for the creation of dedicated ISDN or Frame Relay lines between the Province and some Municipalities which will be the reference point for the surrounding smaller ones. This project will allow different services also based on cartography.

Figure 4 represents the network scheme.

Figure 4

TAMTEL network

3.3 AGREEMENT WITH CADASTRAL ADMINISTRATION

Cadastral cartography has always been an important informative base for the description of the territory useful for land planning and as an instrument for local fiscal control.

Recently Province of Bologna, Emilia-Romagna Region, Municipalities of Bologna and Imola and Cadastral Office of Bologna (UTE) signed a 10-year agreement aimed at updating all the arrears of the cadastral terrain database (about 44000 dossiers). This database will be available to the partners for the whole period. In this way, the Province of Bologna will be able to serve its Municipalities giving them, for internal use only, a copy of the cadastral data.

In order to use cadastral data into its GIS, the Province equipped with a data conversion system which allows different conversion levels on different operative systems.

The process is described in fig. 5.

Figure 5

Cadastral data conversion system towards ArcInfo language. Dashed arrows indicate an optional conversion. Conversion modules are produced by Sysdeco Italia on NT and by CORE on UNIX.

4 . COMMUTER PROJECT

4.1 GENERAL FEATURES

Commuter project is part of the Esprit programme aimed at promoting research and development activities in the field of advanced information technologies. The main aim of the project is the development of a system which supports management and updating of geo-data used by public administrations and, nowadays, spread on different departmental databases and systems.

Geo-referenced data, used for providing services and for accomplishing institutional tasks, need to be continuously updated, controlled and validated. Therefore, Commuter project aims at developing software and methods to support update and integration of geo-data and transactions executable by remotely distributed data bases. The expected result is an infrastructure which allows, by means of information technologies, updating of geo-data in various institutional contexts which differ according to national applications.

4.2 ITALIAN PILOT APPLICATION

With particular reference to the Italian context, Commuter aims at equipping Public Administrations with multimedia tools, in order to simplify the management and the processing of cadastral data. It allows to acquire data and information for cadastral estate management and future planning purposes, to access methods for updating cartographic and semantic data, to improve data exchanging between different organisations. The main innovation of the project is the possibility to propose a directly executable updating of cadastral data (fig. 6a) from a remote site located in the Municipalities: Commuter includes a geographic data updating language, TTML (fig. 6b).

Figure 6a

The update cycle. From a remote workstation, end-users can perform an updating proposal which will be submitted to the validator: if the request is accepted, the Central GIS DB will be updated.

Figure 6b

The Transformation and Transaction Management Language (TTML).

The system (fig. 7) is constituted by a Territorial Service Centre (TSC) where a copy of all data regarding the four municipalities, either cadastral and territorial, is stored. This TSC is the computer server of the Intranet which will be constituted by four computer clients located into the Municipalities. The communication infrastructure (TLC) will be of direct or ISDN type at 64 Kbps with TCP/IP communication protocol.

Figure 7

Logical architecture of the system for the Italian application.

4.3 THE PROTOTIPE

A prototype of the Italian application has been already developed by Olivetti Ricerca, the technical partner, and will be soon available at the Internet address http://cst.provincia.bologna.it (fig. 8).

Figure 8

Homepage of Commuter prototype.

At the moment the prototype allows to get three kinds of certificates: "visura", "estratto" and "destinazione urbanistica".

"Visura mappa" is a cadastral certificate representing the properties description of a company inside the Municipal boundaries; "estratto mappa" is a part of a cadastral sheet representing the parcel; "destinazione urbanistica" shows the town planning purposes belonging to the parcels required by the user.

Another section concerns the update proposal upon the databases, either cartographic or alphanumeric. This part is still to be enhanced.

5. CONCLUSION

The pilot application for the cadastral case in Italy, defined in Commuter, aims at defining and evaluating a new technological support framework in order to handle the exchange of legal data between Cadastral Office and Municipalities. Furthermore, the fiscal policy of remotising tax collection is of great importance, since the cadastral archive is the basic reference to any taxation process. The area of Bologna was selected for the experimentation of Commuter because of the high level of experience in managing cartographic data and for the good quality of cadastral and territorial data at provincial level. Four Municipalities surrounding Bologna will be linked to a telematic pole located in a service centre where the staff of the Province together with the cadastral officers will supervise the entire process. The communication infrastructure is based upon a fast digital data transmission network, where ad hoc templates of real data sets will be open to different users.

REFERENCES

• AA.VV. (1993), "Progetto Territorio – Il Sistema Informativo Territoriale della Provincia di Bologna", PTI Provincia di Bologna, Bologna.
• P. Cupido (1995), "Progetto Territorio - Il Catasto e la Cartografia numerica", PTI Provincia di Bologna e Universita' di Bologna, Bologna.
• A. Durazzi (1994), "Progetto Territorio – La diffusione dei Sistemi Informativi Geografici in Europa: il caso delle aree metropolitane di media e grande dimensione", PTI Provincia di Bologna e Università di Bologna, Bologna.
• M. Mondini, E. Cova (1998), "Commuter Project – An overview of the Italian application", in Proceedings of the 4^th EC-GIS Workshop, in press.