TEACHING GEOMATICS IN ITALY F. Rinaudo Politecnico di Torino – DITAG – Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24 – 10129 Torino, Italy – (fulvio.rinaudo@polito.it) KEY WORDS: Education, Geomatics, Cartography, Photogrammetry, Geodesy ABSTRACT: Italy never had a Survey/Geomatics School. Metric survey disciplines have been always interpreted as basic or ancillary topics for civil-building-environment engineers, land planner-conservator architects, geologists and in some cases archaeologists. Italy represent a unique phenomenon inside Europe where usually each Country develop a specific School in Geomatics among other Engineer and Architect Schools. This fact forces Italian Geomatics teacher to use different approaches in teaching Geomatics disciplines considering different skills of the students and they are concentrated on specific interesting applications. Only inside PhD Schools it is possible to give a complete theoretical approach to Geomatics disciplines and to build-up new researchers and teachers. Nowadays it becomes more and more difficult to develop also basic research on Geomatics due to national and international trends to support only finalized research project on practical applications. Therefore new strategies have to be developed in order to support basic studies about new instruments and algorithms: this effort requires more deep understanding of the fundamentals of Geomatics disciplines and a production of text books fixing basic principles and new theoretical achievements. In the same time it is necessary to provide the users of our techniques and instruments not only good example of applications but also simple text explaining how to correctly manage a metric survey with different technologies. New communication technologies allow also new way of teaching such as lessons recorded and distributed by means social network (e.g.Youtube) or related international committees (e.g. ISPRS, CIPA, ICA, etc.). A serious problem that Geomatics has to face is to underline the differences among other related disciplines such as Computer Vision, Computer Graphic, Virtual Reality, etc. The paper presents the Italian way of teaching Geomatics into engineering and architectural faculties and some proposal to face the coming years which require a chance in Geomatics diffusion and communication. 1. INTRODUCTION The relatively young history of Italy (which started just 150 years ago with a United Kingdom and just 63 years ago as a Democratic Republic) saw an always increasing interest in cartographic production both for military purposes and cadastral applications. Italy was the first Country where an aerial image was acquired in 1909 over Centocelle (a small town near Rome) and where in 1913 the first map by using aerial photogrammetry was produced. In 1938 the first cadastral map in the World was produced by means of aerial photogrammetry over the province of Viterbo. In that periods the teaching of the metric survey techniques (geodesy, cartography, photogrammetry, terrestrial survey) was provided by the Army and by the Cadastral offices just for the people involved in cartographic activities and also the research activities was managed by IGM (Italian Geographic Military Institute) responsible for the production of the 1:25.000 scale map of the Italian territory and by private and public company directly involved in instrument design and production (e.g. Galileo, OMI Nistri). This situation never changed over the years: in Italy it is not possible to find a bachelor or Master curriculum based on Geomatics. Also in PhD Schools and other High Schools is not possible today to find a specific curriculum based on Geomatics. In both cases Geomatics teaching is inserted in a more wide context such as Land Planning, Engineering monitoring, Environmental applications, Cultural Heritage documentation, Agricultural and Geological applications. In the following paragraphs a short overview on the Geomatics teaching in Italy at different levels is offered and some considerations about the future of our discipline in the Italian context are offered. 2. BACHELORS AND MASTERS 40 different Universities in Italy offer some course in Geomatics in all the 20 Regions (see fig. 1). Figure 1. University locations in Italy