Project Tovel part 1: open geodata

As many of you know, since some years we (Arc-Team) are supporting Prof. Tiziano Camgna's project regarding the underwater forest of Lake Tovel (1, 2) in Trentino (Italy).
In the past days we are asked to give a lesson about our contribution to the project at the Liceo Scientifico Bertrand Russel of Cles (TN, Italy). In order to prepare some data for the event, I started to work on a 3D map of the underwater surface of the lake and,  to collect material for different ArcheOS videotutorials I recorded almost the complete process. For this reason I start today a series of "minipost" to publish this material, hoping that this will be useful for some readers.
In this first minipost I will write about open geodata, which are very important for archaeologists, but also for other professionals. Before to enter the topic, I have to say that we live and work (fortunately for us) in a Italian province (Trentino) which is sensible to this matter (open data). If you can understand Italian, you should read +Maurizio Napolitano's blog, one of the real expert in this field currently working at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler.
During the Project Tovel I needed geographical open data to set up the GIS system with some basic cartography. More specifically I started with the "Carta Tecnica Provinciale" (a technical map of the province), which I downloaded form the "Portale Cartografico Trentino" of the S.I.A.T. (Sistema Informativo Ambientale e Territoriale of the Province Trentino). As you can read in the portal (sorry, just Italian), the C.T.P. (Carta Tecnica Provinciale) is available Under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 terms.
The videotutorial you can see below just show the simple process to access and download these data (in raster or vector) form the webgis service.

I hope this first post was youseful for some of you, have a nice day!

Data sharing (Vervò webgis)

One of the main topics during the workshop in Ferrara concerned "open data", and particularly we talked about the problems in data sharing. It looks like that in the last years the the situation did not change very much (at least in Italy): archaeological discussion and research inside the scientific community are still slowed by the difficulties of official institutions in data release (for many different reasons, not least of which a general climate of suspicion between archaeologists).
Anyway, according to our past experiences, we have to say that we were quite lucky, finding often (in our institutional partners) people who did not underestimate the problem and allowed us to share archaeological data in specific project. The media we normally chose for this purpose is the webgis.
The image belows regards one of this projects, oriented to archaeological research and conservation in a small area (the territory of Vervò, in north-west Trentino, Italy).

 
The webgis was developed in 2009 by Giuseppe Naponiello using entirely Free and Open Source Software (soon Giuseppe will write a post with more technical information about it); the data come from the research of Alessandro Bezzi and are released with a Creative Commons license. The project was possible thanks to Dr. Nicoletta Pisu of the "Soprintendenza per i Beni Librari Archivistici e ArcheoLogici di Trento".
Actually you can visulize the webgis here.