Luigi La Riccia

Exploration of cultural heritage information via textual search queries

Searching information in a Geographical Information System (GIS) usually imposes that users explore precompiled category catalogs and select the types of information they are looking for. Unfortunately, that approach is challenging because it forces people to adhere to a conceptualization of the information space that might be different from their own. In order to address this issue, we propose to support textual search as the basic interaction model, exploiting linguistic information, together with category exploration, for query interpretation and expansion. This paper describes our model and its adoption in the OnToMap Participatory GIS.

OnToMap: Semantic Community Maps for Knowledge Sharing

We present the information retrieval model adopted in the OnToMap Participatory GIS. The model addresses the limitations of keyword-based and category-based search by semantically interpreting the information needs specified in free-text search queries. The model is based on an ontological representation of linguistic and encyclopaedic knowledge, which makes it possible to exploit terms and synonyms occurring in the definitions of concepts to flexibly match the users and systems terminologies. This feature enables users to query the application using their own vocabulary.

Semantic Interpretation of Search Queries for Personalization

This demo paper describes the semantic query interpretation model adopted in the OnToMap Participatory GIS and presents its benefits to information retrieval and personalized information presentation.

Nature Conservation in the Urban Landscape Planning

This contribution briefly reflects on the evolution of nature in the city, according to the existing literature on landscape in the Italian urban planning tradition. New approaches to the urban nature conservation strongly depend on the regulations that planning can give in terms of local ecosystem services, absorption of pollutants in the atmosphere, noise reduction and allocation of places for recreation. The conservation of nature in the city is also part of the global effort to stop the biodiversity decline. In fact, landscape, the urban one, has the ability to introduce the social dimension and is therefore functional to the implementation of urban nature conservation frameworks. Current urbanizations, which are closest to natural areas, often demonstrate at all scales a lack of social and ecological relationships: the risk is a conceptual and physical insularization, which reduces public support to nature conservation, causes a further loss of biodiversity and does not promote the generation of new ecosystem services. One of the main future challenges will therefore be to convert the existing conservation strategies and introduce specific regulations in planning for natural areas that may be better integrated with the urban context: this contribution discusses the fact that the landscape can be the element that may drive this integration.

Ecological Networks in Urban Planning: Between Theoretical Approaches and Operational Measures

The ecological network can be considered in different ways: as a strictly interrelated system of habitats, as parks and protected areas network, as a multi-purpose ecosystemic scenario, as a sequence of natural, rural and open landscapes. Nevertheless, all the interpretations of natural landscapes not always have been considered in the lexicon of urban and regional planning, relegating natural and rural areas to an “inessential” role (and generically defining them as “in state of pre-urbanisation”).

Representing Ecological Network Specifications with Semantic Web Techniques

Ecological Networks (ENs) are a way to describe the structures of existing real ecosystems and to plan their expansion, conservation and improvement. In this work, we present a model to represent the specifications for the local planning of ENs in a way that can support reasoning, e.g., to detect violations within new proposals of expansion, or to reason about improvements of the networks. Moreover, we describe an OWL ontology for the representation of ENs themselves. In the context of knowledge engineering, ENs provide a complex, inherently geographic domain that demands for the expressive power of a language like OWL augmented with the GeoSPARQL ontology to be conveniently represented. More importantly, the set of specification rules that we consider (taken from the project for a local EN implementation) constitute a challenging problem for representing constraints over complex geographic domains, and evaluating whether a given large knowledge base satisfies or violates them.

Conclusions. Perspectives for New Landscapes

This final chapter tries to retrace the entire theoretical process that has brought from the initial hypothesis of the research towards the recommendations described in the fourth chapter. Considering that today landscape has conquered the scene and the thought about landscape seems to prevail on the great themes of the twentieth century urban planning, it is necessary to return to reason at the local level, because it is at the operational level that we build the landscape with the everyday transformations that form the city and its context. So we need rules, even new, but basically not very different from those of the past, able to intercept and guide these changes.

Approaches to Landscape: Background and Emerging Trends in the Scientific Debate

The recent debate on architecture, city and territory is characterized by continued reference to the landscape. This chapter explores the theme analysing background and emerging trends in planning from the point of view of approaches to landscape. Over the last fifteen years, the innovations introduced at the cultural level by the European Landscape Convention seem to be widely shared, systematizing in particular a subject that has raised interest and that, for some years, has been central at the international level in the framework of the cultural and environmental policies. Today, a new contemporary discourse on the landscape is growing, even from the point of view of his verbal and iconic reproduction, becoming central in various disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, archaeology, ecology, and even essential in subjects like philosophy and geography. The reasons for this centrality can be found in a kind of reconsideration of the relationship between man and nature, which search also for a clear and unambiguous definition of landscape.

Landscape in the Urban Planning Practices. Case Studies in Italy

The chapter, which is the crux of the book, is dedicated to the implications that emerge considering the landscape as an “object” of planning. This is the in-depth analysis of 4 case studies in Italy and of comparative case studies in Europe: this choice is precisely part of a wider discourse on the evolution of the consideration of the landscape within the urban practices. Some fundamental paradigms of the landscape (historical, morphological, ecological, perceptual) suggest in part the periodization which has determined the comparability between the selected cases, on the one hand, by exogenous factors to urban practices (economic, social dynamics, political, cultural, etc.); on the other, by elements within the specific planning tool, i.e. the ability of a face, using its “technical structure”, the landscape issues. Hence each case under consideration has not been identified in one plan, but refers to plans drawn up at different times, following the changing of city conditions. This is the case then of Assisi, in 1958 and 1969; Urbino, in 1964 and 1994; Reggio Emilia, in 1994 and 2007; Bergamo, in 1997 and 2010. These case studies are identified considering their basic approaches, experiences so positive towards the issue as unique in the context of the Italian planning, highlighting common lines of integration.

Theoretical and Operative Recommendations for Urban Planning

The chapter gives some thoughts gained through the analyses conducted on some Italian urban plans and considering the overview about landscape planning in the European context. It thus makes explicit the initial assumptions through which moves the whole job: what has changed in the current way of doing urban planning and what are the new methods of intervention? Instead what has been learned and what left out in the ordinary instrumentation, in terms of procedures, tools, approaches? This chapter provides a more synthetic approach, in which the emerging ideas can contribute to outline a set of theoretical and practical elements that can be put in place today to the landscape at the local level.