open source, WEBGIS Research Papers (original) (raw)

The Botanical Garden of Naples is one of the most prominent botanical gardens in Europe for the relevance of its collections and the number of species in culture. The decree of foundation of the garden was published in the 1807 signed by Giuseppe Bonaparte, during the French domination of the Kingdom of Naples. Michele Tenore was the first Director from 1810 to 1860. During his 50 years of direction he increased the collections, bringing the number of cultivated species to about 9,000 and organizing the first exhibition areas according to the criteria of the time (Menale & De Luca 2008-2009). Nowadays, the garden covers an area of twelve hectares, which include open exhibition sectors organized with ethnobotanic, ecological and/or systematic criteria and greenhouses for the cultivation of tropical and sub-tropical plants; the species in cultivation are approx. 15.000.
During its two centuries of life, the garden modified its aspect several times for various reasons, i.e. according to the evolution of scientific knowledge, to the increase of botanical collections, always becoming increasingly more conspicuous, to the need of creating new buildings or structures to support research activity and education.
To describe the heritage of the garden and its temporal evolution, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is a useful solution. GIS is a set of tools for capturing, storing, extracting, transforming, and displaying real-world spatial data (Burrough 1986). GIS can analyze the spatial and temporal change of a territory or of different phenomena (Aronoff 1987). A recent evolution of GIS is the Open Web Mapping (WebGIS), a process of designing, implementing, generating, and delivering maps on the World Wide Web and its products (Dizaji 2016). Existing Internet solutions for disseminating spatial data, such as geoportals or WebGIS, essentially provide functionality for searching, mapping, publishing and limited querying (Frehner & Brandli 2006). The increasing popularity of geo-browsers as tools for displaying geographically referenced information provides insights and opportunities for those who, not being specialists in GIS, want to take advantage from the exploration and the communication power offered by these software products (Notarangelo & Alga 2011).
We describe a WebGIS application for the Botanical Garden of Naples. Through this tool, it is possible to visualize the historical cartography of the garden since 1818 and to compare it with the recent layout of the institution. It is also possible to access the description of the areas, with information on single botanical species. The cartography is georeferenced and overlapped to the Open Street Maps (Mordechai & Weber 2008), and a geolocation feature allows visitors to navigate through the exhibition areas, or to move on historic cartography to observe the changes that took place over time.
WEBGIS app.: http://www.ortobotanico.unina.it/OBN4/mv/mappa/webgis/wobn.html