An open-HGIS project for the city of Parma: database structure and map registration

The observation of the structure of the city and its inhabitants, and how such system evolves in time, is essential in almost all land planning and urban development activities, as well as in any historical study. Historical GIS in the last decade proved to be one of the most promising frameworks, that can provide innovative tools and methodological approaches in this field, allowing new research perspective and concept in many fields. The paper describes the early stages of the development of a HGIS that considers different historical periods of Parma (Italy), with particular attention to cadastral documents and associated census data. These data are gathered from the main cadastres of the city: the Sardi Atlas of 1767, the Bourbon Cadastre of 1853, the Post-Unitarian Cadastre of 1901 and the Cadastre of 1940. Other social statistics, conserved in the local communal and state archives, such as census reports, building permits, deeds, transfer of property, wills, etc., were considered in the project, leading to a quite complex database structure. In the hope of making the HGIS as flexible and scalable as possible, and to make the system usable to the widest spectrum of users, an open-source database architecture based on Postgresql/Postgis has been developed. The paper provides information about the database structure and the map registration stages, with particular reference to the first historical period considered in the project, based on the Sardi Atlas (drawn in 1767), which can be considered as the first parcelgeometric cadastre of Parma.