Cultural Heritage and Web-Mapping Nicola Maiellaro, Antonella Lerario Construction Technologies Institute National Research Council, strada Crocifisso 2/B, 70125 Bari, Italy nicola.maiellaro@itc.cnr.it SUMMARY The use of computerized information is a growing part of our society; people use geographic, social, economic, political and environmental information to answer practical questions. Information mining and sharing is therefore of crucial importance: drawings, photographs, documents and surveys information enhance the understanding of resources; map positioning offers a new way to examine resources not only individually but also in relationship to each other. GIS technology is very useful because it offers a powerful set of tools for collecting, storing, analyzing and visualizing spatial data. Finally, publishing GIS on the Internet makes it possible to share information with a large amount of people, thus enhancing the exploitation of resources. The system developed in our Institute is intended to explore such potentialities in the field of cultural heritage; the prototype is based on SQL-server for data and DbMAP ASJ for cartographic publication and data query over the Internet; the extensive use of codes makes the system very flexible. KEYWORDS: cultural heritage, webGIS, GIS INTRODUCTION Over the past decades, the concept of cultural heritage has expanded to include different materials (such as vernacular architecture, ensembles of buildings, natural and cultural landscapes) and other objects that are significant to specific groups of society. Moreover, in the twentieth century, the conservation community and the heritage field have undergone an extraordinary expansion and new groups have become involved in the creation and care of heritage. These groups of citizens arrive with their own criteria and opinions on how to establish significance, what merits conservation, and how it should happen. Then, heritage, and the right to make decisions about it, is sometimes the subject of debate between different groups. In the field of physical planning this problem has been recently recognized and a new planning approach has been introduced: the so-called 'reconnaissance planning' (Kluskens, 1999); the emphasis mainly lays upon the ‘planning process’ where various actors within the socio-physical organization are given opportunities to contribute to the final decision. Organizations are now able to supply the public with decision-making environments based around Geographical Information Systems across the Internet, enhancing the two-way flow of information between the public and those governing them, developing communities interested in particular problems and aiding the formation of a democratic consensus in problem areas (Evans et al., 1999). Also in the field of cultural heritage, the role of citizens is very important to reach effective resources preservation, especially for minor heritage. Anyway, it is necessary to document the location, nature and quality of all cultural resources, through a GIS-based cultural resource inventory. The function of the inventory is to provide information that can be used to assist in the site management decision- making process, as well as to enable researchers to access the results of all documents already provided for each site. Our system will contribute to this end publishing data on the Web using different interfaces. IDENTIFYING AND LOCATING RESOURCES For heritage preservation and management, accurate location is a key to learn about traditions, settlement patterns and past life ways; identifying and following trends on the landscape requires that we can locate resources on the ground (Deidre McCarthy and Stein, 2001). Resources identified