Articles by Andrea De Tommasi

Recently, some fundamental updates of the Italian legislative framework clarified the topics of public access to and dissemination of data held by public administrations. Specifically, three legislative decrees broadened the scope of the existing laws and regulations to 1) allow public and private users to access more easily public data, 2) stimulate public administrations to better improve their data delivery systems, and 3) activate both new freely and pay-per-download data provisioning procedures, for the benefit of both public and private users. In this evolving scenario, during the last ten years the SITAR Project demonstrated that for the Public Archaeology of Rome and its broad territory it is necessary to 1) achieve a total accessibility of scientific data, also through participative processes and tools allowing ubiquitous access to and real integration, and consequently, validation of information; 2) engage in this participation all users involved in data and knowledge (re-)production and sharing, from scientists and scholars, to public administrators and officers, up to professionals as well as members of the public and all other stakeholders. In this paper, the authors deal with the newly designed SITAR Project data licensing policy illustrating the legal bases on what the SITAR administrative procedures are being implemented and experimented about data openness and their public access and use. The authors also try to offer a contribution to the long cultural debate of these last decades about interrelationships between scientific research and administrative actions of public bodies, public access to data and legal reservations, creativity in archaeology and copyright-copyleft of scientific data produced by public administrations and/or professionals on behalf of the former.

The development of the SITAR project took place in a time of new approaches in the management and use of archaeological geospatial data, even at the higher central levels of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage (MiBAC). SITAR represents an important technological and institutional challenge for the Special Superintendency for Archaeology in Rome, the governmental institution in charge of the safeguarding and exploitation of the Roman archaeological heritage. The aim of the SITAR project is the construction of the Archaeological Territorial Informative System of Rome for the management of the enormous and heterogeneous amount of data and for the multi-dimensional representation of the valuable historical context of a constantly evolving city like Rome. After a first phase of conceptual analysis, data model definition and taxonomic structures description, currently the technological development is focused on the SITAR project web platform and more specifically on the webGIS. The paper discusses the use of basic GIS functions integrated with specific tools for dynamic dataset multi-representation and web editing. These implementations allow all the users, both scholars and archaeology amateurs, to build their own new geospatial information; users now play an actual role in the system and in the enrichment of collective knowledge.