Mapping landscape qualities in inner areas and UNESCO sites in north sicily by a GIS multisource geodatabase

The research aims to outline a mapping process that incorporates the use of analytic maps, synthetic maps, and diagrams to aid in the development of a strategy for sustainable tourism in the inner areas of the country. The emerging forms of sustainable tourism require a specific territorial strategy, supported by a precise knowledge and mapping process able to include minor places through the accessibility of less-beaten tracks, by creating new synergies between heterogeneous places which are only apparently unconnected with each other. Nowadays, the great availability of geolocalized information, gettable by heterogeneous web sources, enables carrying out a transversal mapping of physical landscape qualities and tourism opportunities, by linking local and global, tangible and intangible networks. The research has been centered on the northern coast of Sicily, in between the UNESCO sites of Palermo and Cefalù with its inner area of the Madonie UNESCO Global Geopark, where natural and human facts, are strongly interlaced with the landscape, creating a unique territorial configuration. The research shows how a GIS multisource geodatabase, made-up of punctual, linear, and areal entities, related to different fields of investigation, from natural to human, such as geology, nature, history, heritage, food, and culture, can support the definition of new actions in the sustainable tourism sector, in order to enhance the existing heritage. The mapping process, through visual thinking, is configured as a privileged tool for the knowledge of places and for the creation of new forms of representation.