Navigating on the past, as a bird flight, at the territorial scale of historical topographic maps. WMS on the "Corografie delle Province del Regno Lombardo-Veneto”, for accessing cadastral map catalogue

The research presented here has developed within the project "Atl@s of historical cadastral and topographic maps of Lombardy (2009-2011)" funded by 'Fondazione Cariplo', involving 'Politecnico di Milano - BEST Dept.' (project leader), 'Archivio di Stato di Milano', 'Agenzia del Territorio', 'Centro Studi PIM', 'Regione Lombardia', 'Comune di Gorgonzola' (partners). The first release of the geo-portal (www.atlantestoricolombardia.it), has been presented to the public on 19th January 2010 after a year's work. Conceived in the form of a modern Atl@s, it has been designed with a double level access to the historical cadastral series available by ASMi ('Catasto Teresiano', 'Lombardo Veneto', 'Cessato Catasto'), together with samples of 'Impianto in conservazione' by AdT (Italian Cadastral Administration): besides a catalogue approach level based on classical research keys (the application, Divenire©, has been inherited by ASMi from the Archive of Venice), an open geographic level has been implemented by the research group of Politecnico, with ongoing functionalities, based on a territorial regional basis, obtained experimenting and georeferencing small scale topographic maps, principally here focused on the historical chorographic maps. The methodologies, the reliability and feasibility of the georeferenced output, and the overall potentiality to use them as a gate to access the local scale represented by the spread diffusion of the cadastral series, are the topics discussed. Due to the high number of historical cadastral sheets, the generation of a systematic GeoDB on the local cadastral series - with a rigorous georeferencing method, already documented within the research - shall be faced by government policies and by algorithm automation, to become sustainable in the next years, in terms of time and costs. Thus, in the meantime, few functionalities are being tested to allow an agile user access, based on a geographic approach to the non georeferenced sheets, straightening the immediate content of the geographic language to a large public demand, respect to the simple key queries, through Web Mapping Services (WMS) developed on the small scale map: ASMi is going to share - over this project through the portal - more than 28.000 sheet units, that can find a challenge in the geographic fruition. Flying the territory of the past with the small scale synthesis, its political assets and physical elements, such as the hydrographic network, can offer interesting thematic cultural opportunities to knowledge dissemination of 'our territory' and its preservation.