A Gis of Sardinia's Coastal Defense System (Xvi – Xviii Century)

Abstract

ABSTRACT:The use of GIS as a tool for archival, analysis and representation of geographic information has become significantly popular in many scientific fields that are directly concerned with the "territory" as their object of study. The field of application of GIS, however, has expanded also in other areas, such as those related to humanities and architecture, in which the territory is studied in an "indirect" mode because it constitutes a kind of substrate on which to develop a specific spatial analysis for particular purposes. Among these areas are to be included certainly archeology and restoration, fields in which the GIS has become a useful tool for historical studies. In this work we present a GIS developed for the study of the historical and territorial coastal defense system of Sardinia (16 th -18 th century), in order to respond to the need to store, analyze and efficiently manage the information regarding cultural heritage and landscape heritage such as that consisting of the coastal defensive towers of Sardinia. This defensive system, in fact, was composed by over 100 towers positioned around the entire coastal perimeter of Sardinia, of which more than 90 still exist today. Their position was planned on the basis of the following criteria: -Warning the neighboring towers about the sighting of enemy ships -Protecting coasts located near the towns -Monitoring the water sources near the coast -Allowing for the full visibility of the coasts of any morphology With this study we also verified, through the use of high resolution and high accuracy DTM (LiDAR) and the topographic databases, whether the positioning criteria specified in the design of the system were respected and effective.

Linear programming for the analysis and virtual recreation of historical events: the allocation of the artillery during the Siege of Bilbao in 1874

“…Beginning with the topography, Digital Terrain Models (DTM) -apart from the most direct representations of height, slope and orientation-can be employed for analysing the visibility -either between specific points or to show complete viewsheds from a network of watchtowers (e.g. Llobera, 2007;Rua, Gonçalves, & Figueiredo, 2013;Deidda, Musa, & Vacca, 2015;Earley-Spadoni, 2015, Ferreira-Lopes & Molina, 2018Murphy, Gittings, & Crow, 2018)-, as well as for the obtention of the minimum cost paths and, hence, to retrace lost routes (Canosa-Betés, 2016) or to represent different groups of transit points which can explain episodes that may have happened during the journeys (Ferreira-Lopes & Pinto, 2018). Another possibility is to define an index of "defensiveness" based on the relief of the surrounding terrain that can explain the location of defensive structures and settlements.…”

3D Survey with Apple LiDAR Sensor—Test and Assessment for Architectural and Cultural Heritage

“…The documentation and metric knowledge of cultural heritage is becoming crucial if we consider the state of degradation of the majority of historical built heritage and the associated restoration interventions. For these valuable architectures, in-depth metric documentation is fundamental for an overall understanding of these structures, and, in turn, to support architects and engineers in optimizing restoration, conservation, safeguarding and artifact enhancement [1][2][3][4]. Recently, however, public funding intended for geometric investigations has been reduced, leading stakeholders and researchers to develop lowcost geomatic tools and methodologies to tackle this necessity, without compromising the metric accuracy too much [5].…”

A Spatial Information System (SIS) for the Architectural and Cultural Heritage of Sardinia (Italy)

“…In Deidda [27] GIS is used for the management and conservation of the 16th-18th century coastal defense system. In "The use of GIS technology in cultural heritage" [28], Petrescu presents an overview on the use of GIS and WebGIS for cultural heritage around the world.…”