Supporting the Promotion of Historical and Cultural Treasures with a GIS-Based Visual Environment

Applying geographic information technology in the area of cultural heritage has recently raised a great deal of interest. Indeed, several geographic information systems (GIs) have been developed targeted to applications l ~ k e tourism promotion, archaeological investigations and monument preservation. In spite of GIs high potentiality, users are often faced with the implicit complexity of data and are forced to become familiar with the rclated concepts. This is also true in cultural fields where final users are supposed to be domain experts and rcscarchers, who arc usually not familiar with G I s technology. Visual languages represent a promising means for allowing unskilled users to query geographic databases. The visual environment MGISQL can be used on top of an available GIs able to store and retrieve geographic information. A visual approach allows us to sini~~ltaneously capture the spatial and the thematic components of geographic data, thus providing users with further intuition about the semantics of those data in the real world. In this paper we present an experimentation carried out with the Visual Saler-rw CIS (ViSaGIS), which has been designed to promote the cultural treasures located in the area of the city of Salerno (South of Italy). Our experiment shows how the MGISQL environment can be successfully used to process artistic and archaeological information.