Historic center valuation in landscape planning. Interactive geodatabase in Web GIS Platform

Landscape planning should have censused, described, taxonomized, classified the landscape units along with the degree of their use, according to their intrinsic natural values and among these the Historic Centers today suspended between total abandonment for anthropic desertification and heavy manumission given the lack of sustainable maintenance guidelines. Objective of the research is to design a first conceptual, methodological, operative and instrumental analysis to provide thorough information concerning the landscape-cultural protection in Italy, and in particular about Historic Centers. Research aims to propose a general framework that, with its flexibility and adaptability, might contribute to coordinate landscape planning as well Historic Center revitalization policies. Spill-over and impact of the research is the building-up of an unprecedented knowledge about historic settlements thanks to the design of an Interactive Database of Historic Centers on Web GIS (Geographic Information System) environment called Hyper Atlas of Historic Centers, comprising 4 main features: 1) Heritus; 2) Heritknow; 3) Heritval; 4) HeritWeb. Moreover, within the general framework, it has been tested a new Historic Center Index built by comparing over 10 institutional and scientific examples validating its usefulness and adaptability to other regions.