Open Web Mapping (webGIS) for the Description and Historical Analysis of the Exhibition areas of the Botanical Garden of Naples. Pp. 23-35. In: Cardone B., Di Martino F., Sessa S. (a cura di).

The Botanical Garden of Naples is one of the most prominent botanical gardens in Europe for the relevance of its collections and the number of cultivated plant species. The decree of foundation of the garden was signed by Giuseppe Bonaparte in 1807, during the French Kingdom of Naples. Michele Tenore was the first Director from 1810 to 1860. During his 50 years of direction he increased the collections, bringing the number of cultivated species to about 9,000 and organizing the first exhibition areas according to the criteria of the time (Menale & De Luca 2008-2009). Nowadays, the garden covers an area of twelve hectares, which include open exhibition areas arranged in ethnobotanical, ecological and systematic criteria and greenhouses devoted to the cultivation of tropical and sub-tropical plants; the cultivated species are approx. 15.000. The Garden from its foundation to the present time has broadened its mission to include research, conservation, teaching and public display of plants through the construction of new buildings, such as greenhouses, or increasing the varieties of collections . The employment of GIS methodologies allows to clearly demonstrate the evolution of botanical garden since its establishment. GIS is a set of tools for capturing, storing, extracting, transforming, and displaying real-world spatial data (Burrough 1986). GIS can analyze the spatial and temporal change of a territory or of different phenomena (Aronoff 1989). A recent evolution of GIS is the Open Web Mapping (Web GIS), a process of designing, implementing, generating, and delivering maps on the World Wide Web and its products (Dizaji 2016). Existing Internet solutions for disseminating spatial data, such as geoportals or Web GIS, essentially provide functionality for searching, mapping, publishing and limited querying (Frehner & Brandli 2006). The increasing popularity of geo-browsers as tools for displaying geographically referenced information provides insights and opportunities for those who, not being specialists in GIS, want to take advantage from the exploration and the communication power offered by these software products (Notarangelo & Alga 2011). In this study, we describe a Web GIS application for the Botanical Garden of Naples. This technology has made it possible to manage and visualize , since 1818, historical cartography of the garden so to compare the past garden with the actual. Moreover, it makes possible to download the descriptive texts of the areas and the botanical data on each species. The cartography is georeferenced and overlapped to the Open Street Maps (Mordechai & Weber 2008), and a geolocation feature allows visitors to navigate through the exhibition areas, or to move on historic cartography to observe the changes that took place over time.