A GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR THE SAFEGUARD OF CULTURAL HERITAGE IN THE APULIA OF THE KNIGHTS

The recovery and the electronic fruition of documentary material in architectonic heritage, the development of digital technology methodologies for cultural heritage and the use of new technological and informative systems are more and more diffused nowadays. The potential of these technologies for the planning and the subsequent management of information in cultural heritage fields is various and, above all, the digitalization of data is considered by this time an essential part in a course to cultural heritage valorization. Particularly, among the new applied technologies the Geographical Information Systems, that come up as instruments for the control of territory and are so flexible that they can be applied in different research areas, are more and more frequent. This work is part of a research project called "At the origins of Mediterranean Europe: Monastic and Military Orders", that IBAM-CNR has been carrying out for some year. In this project we are going to analyze and to catalogue all the territory of Apulia in the cartographic sources of The Sovereign Military Order of Malta and then it is going to be implemented in a GIS that has specially been created. The new use of GIS in this application field it will be the implementation of the rich cartographic production of The Sovereign Military Order of Malta, by comparing the "cabrei" (cadastral surveys) which are stored in Apulia with the pictures of those stored in Malta, Napoli and Rome, so that we can increase the cartographic and archives documentation of the territory of Apulia.