Knowledge of the territory: a database with user friendly interface

The principle sources of information regarding national territories are gained from cartography, aerial photos, bibliographical description of the soil. Unfortunately such documents are managed with scarce uniformity. The aim of this work is to provide a tool for knowledge of the land by collecting heterogeneous information in the same data base. Each piece of information is related to topological and geographical information of the territory concerned (covered area coordinates). A database with the relevant items for cataloguing and retrieving information was implemented, and user interaction in the data entry phase is performed through applications written using ORACLE-FORMS. The database may be queried either using standard SQL language or FORMS written applications. In addition, the relevant items may be selected through political, administrative, or ad hoc defined areas which group together elementary territory units. However, one of the most important selection criteria are the coordinates of the area the user is interested in: therefore we implemented a user friendly graphic interface, which allows areas to be selected simply by moving the mouse over a topographic representation of the region the database refers to. The system was developed under the supervision of the technical staff of CNUCE, using ORACLE in MS-DOS environment, following the directives of the "Centro Interregionale di coordinamento e documentazione per le informazioni territoriali".