Open Web Services: new tools for Medievalist Historians to manage and share their research work

The research project presented in this paper regards a joint cooperation between Medievalist Historians and Geomatics experts. The idea was to study if new tools based on Geomatics technologies could provide Historians with new methods to develop their studies, archiving digital data in a geo-database and “spatializing” the information sources to produce maps in a GIS environment. So, in the first part of the project, a GIS was designed and implemented based on data collected from documents preserved in the Italian National Archives. Afterwards, the problem of data integration and sharing among research groups working on Medieval History was dealt with, in order to make data available for the consultation and query by several research groups. Three approaches based on a client-server architecture have been explored: one is typical of the WebGIS architecture; the second one is based on OGC Web services and the third one exploits a Web page while the GIS tools are provided by a Desktop GIS installed locally on a PC. In the paper, the different approaches will be described, in order to underline advantages and disadvantages with respect to the Historians' requirements.