NATURAL HERITAGE MANAGEMENT AND PROMOTION ......This region encompasses a number of interconnected land-scapes ranging from the plain to the Alpine environment, cross-ing the world-wide

NATURAL HERITAGE MANAGEMENT AND PROMOTION THROUGH FREE ANDOPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE: A PRELIMINARY SYSTEM DESIGN FOR THE

INSUBRIPARKS PROJECT

D. Oxoli1∗, M. Cannata2, V. Terza3, M. A. Brovelli1

1 Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Como Campus, Como, Italy -(maria.brovelli, daniele.oxoli)@polimi.it

2 IST-SUPSI, Institute of Earth Sciences, Canobbio, Switzerland - [email protected] Parco Regionale Spina Verde, Como, Italy - [email protected]

Commission IV, WG IV/4

KEY WORDS: Natural Heritage Management, FOSS4G, Sustainable Tourism, Cross-Border Cooperation

ABSTRACT:

Nowadays, sustainable development and preservation of territories poses a number of challenges requiring innovative and robusttechnological tools to fully accomplish them. According to this, the design of an integrated tourism management system is herediscussed. The tourism management system is developed for the Insubria Region within the INSUBRIPARKS project, fundedby the Interreg program of the European Union. The Insubria is a historical-geographical area stretches between Northern Italyand Southern Switzerland embedding a valuable historical and natural heritage. Nevertheless, the tourism potential of the regionis not fully exploited due to a fragmented political context within the geographical area that extends across different local andnational jurisdictions. The final goal of the project to increase tourism attractiveness of the Insubria Region through the provisionof physical infrastructure, the development and promotion of new tourism experiences, and the deployment of a standardizedInformation Technology infrastructure to support cross-border land management and marketing operations. Central to this paperis the preliminary design of this infrastructure that will provide tools for supporting information generating and consuming amongproject partners and external stakeholders. The design phase leverages exclusively Free and Open Source Software. Alongside thepreliminary architecture, both use cases and user requirements are discussed together with the expected benefits deriving from theco-creation of best tourism management practices by means of open and shared software platforms.

1. INTRODUCTION

The management and promotion of peculiar territories suchas protected areas and natural parks have emerged as criticaltasks to unpin their tourism potential while ensuring sustainableexploitation of their landscape and environmental resources.These tasks are often hindered by fragmented political contextsto which each protected area may be subjected. This may pre-vent optimal management due to competitive actions as well asweak cooperation among the decision makers (Holden, 2016).

In this context, the implementation of smart Information Tech-nology (IT) applications that support sharing of management-related information as well as fostering of tourism experiencesacross territories has led to countless benefits to the tourismmarket (Gretzel et al., 2015, Antonovic et al., 2015, Li et al.,2017). Indeed, modern Web technologies are key to aid co-ordination across the organizational boundaries, by reducingtechnological barriers and costs of decision making that arerelevant to geographically distributed organizations (Buhalis,2003, Chon, 2013, Masron et al., 2016).

With this in mind, we introduce here the INSUBRIPARKS pro-ject, an Interreg funded project aiming at the harmonisation ofmanagement and promotion practices of natural parks along thecross-border area between Italy and Switzerland. The Inter-reg program is an initiative of the European Union aiming atpromoting investments, innovation and implementation effort

∗Corresponding author

to boost cooperation among regional and local governmentsacross the continent to ensure sustainable impacts for peopleand territories (http://www.interreg-italiasvizzera.eu). Accord-ing to this, the INSUBRIPARKS project objective is to developa network of tourism experiences and facilities through the co-operation among project partners.

The project encompasses multiple actions including the provi-sion of physical infrastructures, mainly dedicated to pedestrianmobility, and the development of a standardized IT infrastruc-ture. The latter is conceived to improve information generatingand consuming among project partners and stakeholders. Thetarget content ranges from geospatial datasets - including tour-ism landmarks and facilities - to information from the crowdsuch as social media posts and reviews. Environmental sensorobservations, namely visitor counts, are also considered. TheIT infrastructure is designed to include exclusively Free andOpen Source Software (FOSS) components and it will providea unified data endpoint for the park managers as well as a ded-icated Web client application for visitors to enhance the virtualexploration of natural parks attractions. Alongside the prelim-inary design of the system architecture, both use cases and userrequirements are briefly discussed. Issues connected to crit-ical data collection and harmonization are outlined. The assetsprovided by the use of FOSS for the development of the stand-ardized IT infrastructure of the INSUBRIPARKS project is dis-cussed together with the underlying benefits deriving from theco-creation of best management practices by means of open andshared software platform.

The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XLII-4/W14, 2019 FOSS4G 2019 – Academic Track, 26–30 August 2019, Bucharest, Romania

This contribution has been peer-reviewed. https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-4-W14-179-2019 | © Authors 2019. CC BY 4.0 License.

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The paper continues as follows. Section 2 includes an overviewof the project partners, activities, and objectives. In Section3, the preliminary design of the IT infrastructure is discussed.Expected results and conclusions are reported respectively inSection 4 and Section 5.

2. THE INSUBRIPARKS PROJECT

The INSUBRIPARKS is an Interreg project funded within thetransnational cooperation program between Italy and Switzer-land 2014-2020. The project proposal was conceived by someof the Lombardy Region (Northern Italy) natural parks belong-ing to the Insubria Region (Figure 1), from which the project in-herits its name. The Insubria is a historical-geographical regionstretching approximately between the Adda river (East) and theSesia river (West), and between the St. Gotthard Pass (SouthernSwitzerland) in the north and the Po Valley in the south.

This region encompasses a number of interconnected land-scapes ranging from the plain to the Alpine environment, cross-ing the world-wide famous region of sub-alpine lakes, suchas the Como Lake, and including many urban centres whichare among the major commercial and cultural hubs of both theLombardy Region and the Canton of Ticino (Southern Switzer-land).

2.1 Motivations and Partnership

The INSUBRIPARKS project aims at overcoming the qualific-atory role of ”green islands” that is often entitled to naturalparks located along heavily urbanized regions, such as the In-subria Region. This by designing and implementing strategiesto integrate the common natural, cultural and historical heritagecharacterizing the project area and - at the same time - to lever-age the local peculiarities of each natural park and surroundingterritories.

In view of the above, the project team is composedprimarily by the natural parks (Figure 1) of the In-subria Region. These are for the Italian side namelySpina Verde (https://www.spinaverde.it), Campo deiFiori (http://www.parcocampodeifiori.it), and Pineta(http://www.parcopineta.org). For the Swiss side, twoparks are involved namely Gole della Breggia (ht-tps://tinyurl.com/y243ryft) and Bosco del Penz which islegally represented by the municipality of Chiasso (ht-tps://www.chiasso.ch). Parks are also identified as primarystakeholders of the project that is expected to unpin the actualtourism potential of this cross-border area by creating betterphysical as well as virtual connections among the local touristattractions.

The no-profit organization Pro Val Mulini ONLUS(http://www.provalmulini.eu) is involved for concerningof the historical and cultural aspects of the project. The SwissRegional Tourism Office (OTR) Mendrisiotto Turismo (ht-tps://www.mendrisiottoturismo.ch) participates to the project toprovide the know-how on best tourism management practices.

Finally, the scientific partners Politecnico di Milano (ht-tps://www.polimi.it) from the Italian side, and The Universityof Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI,http://www.supsi.ch) from the Swiss side, are in charge of thetechnological component of the project that encompasses thedigital data collection and analysis as well the development ofthe standardized IT infrastructure.

Figure 1. Project area and the natural parks involved in theINSUBRIPARKS project

2.2 Objectives and Activities

According to the assets and expertise provided by each partnerand the number of common cultural and environmental heritagecharacterizing the project area, the main objectives of INSUB-RIPARKS is to better connect and promote all those peculiarit-ies to allow exploiting the real tourism potential of the InsubriaRegion.

Figure 2. Summary of the INSUBRIPARKS project strategies,actions, and objective

To achieve the above, three main strategies are considered (Fig-ure 2). The first one is to leverage and extend the available tour-istic experiences offered by the parks. A number of touristicpackages, intended here as new or upgraded thematic itinerar-ies, will be designed and empowered with new infrastructuresas well as extended in terms of cultural content. The secondstrategy consists of the development of a unified communica-tion and marketing office for the promotion of the project out-comes aiming at reaching the largest external audience throughthe extensive use of emerging Web and social media as well asto the coordination of public events and congresses. In parallel,a central management office will be set up that will guaranteecoordination among partners activities as well as control overboth the administrative and technical edges of the project.

Finally, the whole system will take advantage of a standard-ized IT infrastructure that is designed to cope with data collec-tion, analysis, and access needs connected to both the integrated



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management of the parks and the virtual exploration of the pro-ject area by the tourists. The preliminary design of the stand-ardized IT infrastructure, including both functionalities and thesoftware architecture, is discussed in the next section.

The whole project activities are organized into nine dedicatedWorking Packages (WP). The WP activities are summarized inthe project work breakdown structure included in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Schematic of the INSUBRIPARKS project workbreakdown structure

3. IT INFRASTRUCTURE DESIGN FOR NATURALHERITAGE AND TOURISM PROMOTION

The success of any tourism system is determined by the availab-ility of robust and innovative tools for monitoring, planning andmarketing operations (Jovanovic, 2016). Therefore, the adop-tion of cutting-edge technologies to support each project activ-ity has been recognized as a key point by the INSUBRIPARKSproject partners. Indeed, the development of a standardizedIT infrastructure for relevant information collecting, sharing,and consuming among project stakeholders has been includedamong the project core activities.

The main goal of the IT infrastructure is to empower allthe cross-cutting management and promotion operations - in-volving data - with a comprehensive suite of IT tools. These op-erations include monitoring of the environment and the tourismfluxes within the parks by the parks managers, the coordinationand design of promotional activities and the virtual explorationof the park attractions by the tourists, among others. With thisin mind, the target data that will be systematically integratedinto the infrastructure include base cartographic information re-garding transport, accommodation facilities, services, point ofinterest and infrastructure located in the project area. Data fromthe crowd such as videos, pictures, online reviews and socialmedia posts produced by the visitors will be selectively crawledand stored in the system to foster a new sight of the territory.

Finally, a physical sensors network will be deployed at the prin-cipal tourist hot spots of the area. The sensors will deliver vis-itor counts observations to the IT infrastructure. This observa-tions, together with the crowdsourced data, will be exploited tobetter understand tourism fluxes features and better design bothplanning and marketing activities. Finally, the IT infrastructurewill be enriched with the installation of some smart IT stationsthat will provide visitors with access to scientific and culturalcontent directly on the field, with the aim of augmenting theirtourism experiences within the parks.

Most of the target data have a strong geographical trait that sug-gests the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) techno-logies as the most logical pattern for the development of the ITinfrastructure. In general terms, GIS play a critical rule in anymodern management practice. Accordingly, the combination ofmultimedia content and Web technology with GIS provided ina number of cases with substantial enhancement to the attract-iveness also of tourism systems (Wei, 2012).

A parallel concern in conceiving the IT infrastructure is aboutthe technology costs and the long term sustainability of the sys-tem. Considering the very diverse technological and institu-tional background among partners, the IT infrastructure designfocuses on leveraging already existing and stable technologiesto deploy innovative solutions. In particular, FOSS technolo-gies offer capable and reliable software to contribute to the cre-ation of the IT infrastructure by ensuring equitable access to thesystem functionalities to each partner that is not bounded by anylicense or purchase constraint (Brovelli et al., 2017). Moreover,the maturity reached by most of FOSS solutions guarantees us-ability as well as provide the system with a potential to be em-powered, replicated and customized with reduced developmentand economic efforts (Cannata et al., 2015).

Figure 4. Preliminary architecture of the INSUBRIPARKS ITinfrastructure

In view of the above, the INSUBRIPARKS IT infrastruc-ture will include the following main components (Figure 4).The server-side will be implemented to dynamically store, or-ganize, and expose both geospatial data and non-spatial con-tent. The data endpoint will be implemented consideringcutting-edge FOSS solutions such as PostgreSQL-PostGIS (ht-tps://postgis.net), GeoServer (http://geoserver.org) and istSOS



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(http://istsos.org). While PostgreSQL-PostGIS is the databasewhere the structured geospatial information is stored, Geo-server and istSOS will expose the relative data through Web ser-vices compliant with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)standards. In particular, Geoserver will offer a dedicated WebMapping Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS) and WebCoverage Service (WCS) to distribute geographical data whileistSOS will offer a Sensor Observation Service (SOS) to collectand dispatch time series observations collected by sensors orcitizens. The usage of international standard foster the interop-erability and the decoupling of back-end development from thefront-end since the communication and data exchange occursfollowing well defined and commonly accepted protocols andformats. This permits the reuse of technical components and theoptimization of costs and efforts, for example the OpenLayersJavaScript library (https://openlayers.org) that support WMS,WFS and WCS can be used to implement dynamic maps in thebrowser to illustrate the territory of interest and the availableitineraries.

Upon this component, a custom Web dashboard enablingdata management and processing will be created to provide aBusiness-to-Business (B2B) platform to project partners with afocus on park managers. Finally, a map-based Web client willprovide users with Business-to-Customer (B2C) functionalitiessuch as interaction with the information layers as well as ac-cess to smart tools for tourism experience planning. The latterwill allow users getting suggestions and insight into the mostsuitable tourism packages or itineraries according to their ex-pressed preferences and needs.

The client will integrate common operations such as query withthe unique visualization benefits offered by maps. The clientwill take advantage of standard FOSS Web mapping librariessuch as OpenLayers. Custom modules will be developed ad-hoc allowing a dynamic interaction with the data endpoint. Agraphical schema of the architecture is included in Figure 4.

4. EXPECTED RESULTS

The tourism management system that the INSUBRIPARKSproject aims at developing is expected to deliver a number ofbenefits to the tourism promotion of the Insubria Region.

On one side, the provision of new of infrastructure and facil-ities, as well as the extension of tourism packages and - inturn - of the tourism offer will pose as the main tangible out-come from the visitors perspective. Indeed, visitors will finallyhave the possibility of enjoying multiple thematic itinerarieswithin a park and/or following an analogous theme across mul-tiple parks. This enabled possibility is critical to the underlyingproject goal that consists of producing a positive economic im-pact along the project area by facilitating visitors circulationbetween the Lombardy Region and the Canton of Ticino. Onthe other side, the deployment of the standardized IT infra-structure aims at providing a unified hub of tourism informa-tion for the area. Indeed, this wealth of information is currentlyunderexploited or partially fragmented into the partner Web-sites. Afterwards, the conceived IT exploration tools such asthe multi-criteria tourism experience planning module will takeadvantage of the hub, thus providing an immersive virtual ex-perience to potential visitors which will be allowed to interactwith their data of interest improving their connection and in-volvement with the INSUBRIPARKS.

In parallel, the availability of open and shared IT tools for datamanaging - such as the B2B Web Dashboard - promises tofill both communication and coordination gaps among partnersthroughout any the management and promotion tasks. Espe-cially, those tasks affecting not only their inner area but alsoneighbouring territories that require timely and structured ac-cess to any strategic and contextual information.

Finally, the availability of ordered and accessible recordsthrough the data endpoint may benefit also the monitoring ofprogress and impacts of the project itself by allowing for meas-uring of Key Performance Indicators (KPI). These may involveboth real-time and historical analysis e.g. of sensor and crowd-sourced data to assess the global and local performances of thetourism systems providing valuable insight to planners and de-cision makers.

5. CONCLUSIONS

To conclude, in this paper the general features of the INSUBRI-PARKS Interreg project were spelt out. The potential benefitsof introducing a FOSS-based IT infrastructure into a geograph-ically extended tourism management system were discussed.Target data of the project were mentioned by highlighting thestrong geographical component of the information required. Apreliminary architecture of the IT infrastructure was presentedby leveraging some of the most mature and flexible FOSS andFOSS GIS (FOSS4G) Web technologies.

The INSIBRIPARKS project is currently in its start-up phase.Part of the project strategies as well as components of the pre-liminary system architecture might be re-designed or adjustedaccording to the project intermediate outcomes.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research has been funded by the project INSUBRIPARKSwithin the Interreg Co-operation Programme 2014 - 2020 (ID605472).

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NATURAL HERITAGE MANAGEMENT AND PROMOTION ......This region encompasses a number of interconnected land-scapes ranging from the plain to the Alpine environment, cross-ing the world-wide