CATGIS is an approach to the knowledge of the physical and human characteristics of Italy as a result of the pluriannual research project “Dissemimation and experimentation of the cartography, remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a educational technology applied to the territorial and environmental study” financed by MIUR (Education, university and research Italian Ministery) that involved five research unit, as CSSAS .
The aim was to develop a prototype for a new didactic methodology, far from the mnemonic teaching of the geography opened to a different educational graduation (school, university) and also to the refreshing (professional persons) on cartography, remote sensing and GIS.
The research was born to join the informatic dissemination in geography teaching to the knowledge of the tools and method to reading the landscape and analyzing the territorial evolutions in its urban and rural reality, in order to a correct estimation of the conditions and the characteristic of the ecosystem.
Because of the complexity by the coexistence of natural and antrophic elements it was important a multidisciplinary approach: cartography, aerial photogrammetry and remote sensing improve the geography teaching, join technical scientific subjects to the humanistic, are a new instrument of territorial transformations.
The CATGIS website (http://www.dista.agrsci.unibo.it/catgis/) is organized in to 5 themes (cartography, aerial photogrammetry, remote sensing, census data, GIS) , opened by web link in sections.
The first three themes contain:
1. the text, divided into chapters, develop and refresh the specific theme;
2. the didactic files, the summarized the previous section;
3. imagines atlas, that are cartographic, aerial and satellite
The dissemination of the theme census data is organized only into the section “didactic files”, with the evaluation of the statistic processing for some Italian Region and Provinces compared with the demographic census of the beginning ad finishing of XX century. There are also the dynamics of the land use (residential vs productive areas) of some chief town compared with demographic density.
The GIS topic is interactive and present an informatic reading of the Italian territory, divided into Regions with the morphology, hydrography, land use, city boundary and landscape units. By the CATGIS web site is possible surf Italy through the 119 landscape units homogeneous in morphology, geology and land use, with the knowledge of the main antrophic aspects and the dynamics. There is also a possibility to open and download a selection of georeferenced imagines with a short description of the subject.
CATGIS is easily opened to anyone by web site, with a simple surf, with accurate contents and good quality imagines by which you can quickly download documents in pdf format.
It promotes a global approach to the environmental problems, acquiring critical knowledge by geographical reading of land, studying relationships between human and natural environment; knowing and using new technologies and the web site production to support training, diffusion and data interchanges with interested didactic operators.