The Infor.Mare Project

Infor.Mare was concerned as complementary project of MaGIC Project. The aim is to provide
the Civil Protection operators, in case of marine emergency, with all cartographic information of
geological/geophysical interest about Italian Seas, available in scientific literature. In fact published
papers contain a very vast amount of data about seafloor and subsurface characters. Such data even
if unorganized and uneven in precision may be extremely useful to have a first indication on main
characters of a given area.

Therefore the aims of Infor.Mare are to

1 . Identify and collect all the articles published in national and international journals dealing
with geology of the Italians Seas;

2 . extract the most relevant maps contained in the articles;

3 . classify the article maps and additional maps derived from other sources;

4 . digitize and georeference the maps;

5 . build a GIS database for fast and easy access to the scientific mapping to be used during
civil protection emergencies.

Infor.Mare state of art, September 2009: categories of maps and data entered into the database. Maps have been subdivided in three categories, for an easy-to-use, effective and quick search.

The cartographic data collected has been subdivided in three categories:

1. Maps on scientific articles;

2. Scientific maps on non-periodical publications (often large format);

3. Extra data: supplementary non-geological information, both raster or vector data (i.e.: toponyms, administrative boundaries, military camp, natural marine reserves, fishing maps, oil platforms location, etc.).

Moreover, a number of attributes was associated to each map, with bibliographical and cartographic information, such as authors, title of the map, title of the article, name of the journal, scale etc.

In order to retrieve the needed data, searching tools were set-up and the search is done by:

• querying the geographical area of interest, by lat/long or by an interactive map;

• selecting a number of field, such as:

• scale

• map type (sedimentological, mineralogical, etc.);

• word in the title of the map or in the article from where it was extracted.

Currently webgis interface has been implemented which provides access to information database of articles and papers through the web.

Update! Infor.Mare pre-release is online.